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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community"
Date: 29 Mar 1997 12:02:24 -0800
Organization: BEST Internet Communications, Inc.
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <5hjsgg$82p@flea.best.net>
References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5hd29s$e7t@fido.asd.sgi.com> <333C1614.ABD@sgi01.grn.aera.com> <5hhv1k$jh9@fido.asd.sgi.com>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38023 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6500 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29514
:In article <5hhv1k$jh9@fido.asd.sgi.com>,
:Larry McVoy <lm@slovax.engr.sgi.com> wrote:
:>
:...
:>
:>If you have to ask you don't know. Real work is not stuff that
:>works well on an Xterminal. An amazing number of workstations are
:>glorified Xterminals. Real work is rebuilding your kernel in a minute.
:>Running your datawarehouse. Serving up a few million web queries.
:>Real work frequently doesn't fit on a PCI bus or in a $200 motherboard
:>with flakey parts.
:>--
:>---
:>Larry McVoy lm@sgi.com http://reality.sgi.com/lm (415) 933-1804
Please update your information store :-) People who traditionally
slam PC's need to seriously update their opinions with the true facts.
With the advent of the pentium pro and various newer intel chipsets, there
aren't enough parts ON those $200 motherboards anymore *to* make them
flakey. You have the pentium, a few intel chips, and a basically glueless
interface to the dynamic ram and PCI bus. The natoma chipset itself
will do both parity and ECC with parity ram, and the pentium pro's have
the secondary cache on-chip.
With a pentium pro motherboard and the Natoma chipset, PCI bandwidth
has more then doubled. I have, personally (and I know I'm sounding
like a broken record here) run a 32 bit 33MHz PCI bus at 120MBytes/sec.
Period dot.
As far as the I/O boards go... SGI tends to use the same SCSI and
networking chipsets that the PC industry uses, and most PCI I/O boards
these days have a single chip on them. Not much can go wrong.
Just about everything else important... the disk drives and the memory,
are exactly the same between SGI boxes and PC's.
Sure there are badly designed motherboards out there, but nobody I know
actually buys them! Sure there is bad memory out there... Same deal.
When you get right down to it, the most cost effective system you can
buy is the one that has a single processor or two to four tightly
coupled SMP processors (with no intervening logic) and a tightly
coupled memory subsystem. The moment you start putting cpu cards and
memory cards on a bus, your life is enormously complicated and your
manufacturing costs double or tripple.
The plain fact of the matter is that for anyone with I/O needs that
fall under the 120 MBytes/sec category, a modern PC will work extremely
well. Just about every part is multi-sourced and under extreme
competition. Just about every part is a commodity.
-Matt