From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Robert G. Brown" Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 15:54:47 +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 Tue, 14 Jul 1998, Bob Drzyzgula wrote: > Well, I guess that answers the question of why Intel doesn't > cause quad-processor x86 servers to cost $20K... they just > hadn't gotten around to it yet. :-) Yeah, but watch competition drop that price like a rock over the next year. Intel is just trying to squeeze a bit of extra juice out of the lemon before its X86 competitors come out with multiprocessing CPUs and before it comes out with 450 MHz PII's and ultimately merced. PII prices have been in slow-but-steady decline from the minute they came out, and let's be frank -- unless somebody shows a huge performance advantage for the new processors (and so far it looks, unsurprisingly to me, like good old clock by itself continues to dominate overall CPU performance) they are not going to sell if they are priced at 2-4 times single CPU prices. > > 400 MHz - 2 MB cache $4489 !!!!!!!!!!! > > 400 MHz - 1 MB cache $2836 > > 400 MHz - 512K cache $1124 These prices are not so bad, really -- I've paid $1100 for 512K 200MHz PPros! The only unknown is the cost of a quad motherboard that uses them. The Goliath quads have always been expensive, but if quads come out at no more than (say) $1K and octets at $2K (I can dream, can't I?) then a four processor system would probably cost around $6K in components, plus memory; an eight processor system would cost perhaps $11K, plus memory. Memory is likely to be a bigger hit -- 128 MB SDRAM DIMMS are cheap at $200, but 256 MB DIMMS are still rather dear at ~$800-900. If the motherboards still come with only four DIMM slots, getting more than 128 MB/processor will get pretty expensive. Note that I discount the 1MB cache and 2 MB cache CPU's entirely -- for MOST beowulfy apps I really don't think that this will matter enough to be worth it until they drop these prices significantly. I'd rather have 2 512K cache CPUs than 0.8 1024K cache CPUs...although real webserver-type apps might find the bigger caches worth the money. rgb Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@phy.duke.edu