From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Matthew Jacob Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 14:54:38 +0000 Subject: Re: Ultra AXmp Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ultralinux@vger.kernel.org On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, Robert G. Brown wrote: > ...and "manufacturer's who use Intel chips in 4+ CPU SMP machines have to > actually compete in an open market".... > > I'm also not sure about the original premise. At the high end of > multiprocessing systems (or even at the low end:-), I would have > expected the bulk of the cost to be in the design and implementation > of the bus structure that connects the processors to enable shared > access to memory, peripherals, and each other to facilitate high speed > IPC's. Disk is cheap (especially when packaged for a standard > interface, i.e. -- SCSI UW on a PCI bus) and really NIC's (similarly > packaged) are too. Getting disk and networks onto a bus (proprietary > or otherwise) and interfaced with lots of processors and memory and > working out all the DMA issues and cache coherence issues and > busmastering issues -- that's expensive. I think we're all beginning to talk about different things. I believe you can build a very reasonable 2 (to maybe 4-way SMP with off the shelf Intel parts- good both for CPU/thread performance as well as the attachment of a couple PCI busses. That'll not give you a balanced system, but a *better* balanced system than a workstation with a single bus. When you get into bigger than this, that's when, as you say, it gets very expensive. And single SCSI disks *are* cheap, but the infrastructure for 100 of them gets quite expensive. > > I thought the real claim to fame of all of Sun's multiprocessing > systems (and the SP2, and the Power Challenge, and the...) has always > been their really fast/expensive IPC bus, not their interface to > peripherals. wrt Sun: Surely you're kidding (unless you're referring only to the EXXXK series).