On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, Roine Gustafsson wrote:
> Interesting. What was the off-the-shelf price for the Opteron? The
At the time the Opteron-250 cpu was $825. Or were you thinking of
the complete system price? I didn't buy a complete system - just
a motherboard/cpu/memory kit and a powersupply (with the 24pin + 8pin
configuration instead of the usual 20pin + 4pin).
> Opteron prices I've seen have been higher than the Apple G5 prices, but
> maybe not 2x more.
Overall complete system prices are comparable, the G5 systems are
come very well equipped too, only thing I've added to mine is more
memory and a disc.
> A more fair match to Opteron is probably the Power5, which has
Very true - but I don't have one of those yet ;) Are they even
available. Perhaps later in the year Apple will announce a dual core
Power5 based system. That would be fantastic for running FinalCutPro.
> It's an urban myth that 64bit is faster than 32bit, like people assume
> a 2GHz computer is twice as fast as a 1GHz computer.
It's also an urban myth that 64bit is slower than 32bit :)
That doesn't take into account the architecture and instruction set
differences - more registers (and the IA32 is register starved),
wider chunks of data being manipulated/crunched at one time, and so on.
> That is also why Apple have been reluctant to make a 64 bit Mac OS X,
Not really - main reason is most folks who surf the Inet or read their
mail don't it.
> OTOH, if yours *was* the currently baddest setup, then you *did* pay a
> premium :)
Of course - why settle for 2nd best? It's the one toy a year I budget
for and it ended up not being less than expected so there's room for
another toy yet this year.
> I can get used 1GHz P3s for $50 now. A cluster of 100 of those is
That assumes that the task at hand can be split amoung machines _and_
the overhead of communication/datamoving doesn't use most of the
cpu cycles (and GigE TCP data moving will seriously cut into a P3's
available cpu cycles).
Now I could see a group of the single cpu AMD64-3500 or -3700 systems
being used to divide an encoding job up. That'd be cost effective
and wouldn't fry the house electrical system :)
Cheers,
Steven Schultz
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