Nekochan Net

Judging by past SGI prices, that'll run you just a smidge over $47,950. Plus tax and license.

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qspro.html
it says it only supports 32GB... but with
http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configu ... 33Q4R25/4G
or
http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configu ... 33D4R25/4G
64 GB... for $16,000 or $64,000 and 8 2.6GHz SledgeHammer cores... =]
(just pricing the RAM mins you)

but if you're willing to allow that that board can hold 64, then that opens the door for a few other choice tyan boards with 24+GB (32GB)

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8we.html

only 4 cores, and 32GB RAM, but somehow I don't think that will impinge too much.

the downside, is the Operating systems, FreeBSD, which MAC OS is based on, Linux, Solaris, and OS/2... lean pickins.

Which is nothing to the governments, oil companies and academic institutions that will consider purchasing this product.

just read the prism deskside specs and see that it's nothing you can compile using off the shelf
stuff.

_________________
r-a-c.de

sorry for being slow on the uptake, but what are you referring to0?

up to two 1.3 or 1.6GHz Itanium 2 processors with 2 MB L2

you can get a dual 1.6 with 9MB L2 off the shelf.

2-24GB... you can beat that too

up too two ATI x3's... you can beat that

up to two 160GB 7,200 RPM SATA drives... yea, those 160GB 7,200 RPM SATA drives regularly outclass 142GB 15K SCSI drives... oh wait.

one PATA channel, three SATA channels... you can beat that.

4 RS-422 ports... can't think of something offhand that can beat that, but I'm sure there's something out there.

one gigabit E port... can beat that.

six 64/133 PCI slots, can beat that.

the only thing off hand that'd be difficult, is mating an off the shelf Itanium with 2 PCI ex/AGP 8x slots, but then you've got those Opteron boards with the dual PCI ex.

the prism has massive i/o and mem bandwidth. also there's a custom bridge to feed the
gfx units.

_________________
r-a-c.de

the itanium bus is standard, iirc it's 128 bit at 400 MHz or something, anyway I remember calculating the total bandwidth came out to around 50 gigabits (not bytes).

the other SGIs have some sort of 1:1 crossbar so that nodes can talk to eachother with a bandwidth of 128 bits at 400MHz.

on the prism deskside, it is totally, and completely worthless.

the opteron board with the dual PCI ex 16X has exactly twice the efficacy of the custom bridge to feed the gfx units, and the only other i/o is bog standard 64/133 PCI

as for the mem, as I said, it's itaniums standard 128 bit at 400 MHz.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... ML-8G2.cfm
quad interleaved ddr 200 (100 actual)

the deskside prism, is, unfortunately two notches below bog standard.

it's limited to procs with 3MB L2, instead of the 6, & 9 MB available, and it's got agp 8x, instead of pci ex 16x.

I guess we can argue as much as we want, interpolating performance based on a marketing brochure, but the only way of forming a real-life opinion is for one of us to get a Prism Desktop and report back here... Stay tuned

Now we are talking!; Brave man!

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Oh!, let me write that!


Octane / Dual Head

http://twitter.com/GeekTronixShop

That means that everybody should pitch into the "Get Cory a Prism Deskside" foundation

Cory will run benchmarks on the Prism, and somebody could donate the aforementioned "off the shelf" PC parts and he'll benchmark those too

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I [heart] the Performer Town Demo

so your opteron can use system memory for gfx?

however, i've no intention in having a number-battle. i'm under the impression you lack
real world practice. but no problem go and take your amd. whatever makes you happy.
ah one thing you might think about: why are sgi and nec - the both cutting edge companies -
using ia64 and not amd?

_________________
r-a-c.de

you seem to be under the impression that I'm trying to bite off more then I can chew. all I'm trying to do, is point out that the off shelf components can build competitive systems for less money, either starting out with a opteron, or a itanium.

sure but imo the prism has some 'specials' an off the shelf system can't offer.

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r-a-c.de

Why is Cray, a cutting edge supercomputing company using AMD and not IA64?

cray is good but nec's sx-8 is the top.
as i said, nec(vector) and sgi(non vector) are the two leading companies these days.

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r-a-c.de