[BUGS] hardware changing time .. moving forward

[Andrew Reilly]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 09:14:57AM +1100, Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
> 
> On 28/01/2008, at 9:06 PM, harrywwc wrote:
> 
> > my turn...
> >
> > ref: DEC Alpha chip and all that.
> 
> My experience with the Alpha, was that it had absolutely TERRIBLE  
> floating point performance..

How did you manage that?  Did you have all of the "precise
exceptions" and "go slow" switches turned on?

I have to admit that I never got to seriously use an Alpha,
although I sat close to several people who did.  Everyone seemed
very happy with their floating point performance.  The MIPS
boxes that I did get to use were easily twice as fast as the PCs
of the day, though (on floating point).

In the present timeframe, though, Intel Core-2 processors
execute as many flops/clock as Itaniums (if you line 'em up
right) and clock twice as fast.  Athlons/Opterons aren't far
off.  Only the vast caches on Itania and PowerPC-6 really give
them any edge.  MIPS has packed-up and gone embedded.  SPARC
is chasing multi-thread web-server benchmarks and has given
floating point a rest for a while.  Alpha and PARisc have shut
up shop.  One has to get one's flops where one can find 'em,
and frankly, I can't see anything much to complain about.  (And
now VIA/Centaur have announced an x86_64 processor that can
apparently do eight flops/clock with really low latency... who'd
a thunk it?)

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew