SGI launches R16000 352
nkrgovic writes " SGI has just launched a new CPU - the long expected R16000. The new CPU works on 700MHz, has 4MB secondary cache and more goodies.
For now the new CPU is only used in SGI's Fuel workstations, but we should expect to see it pretty soon in SGI's Origin servers as well. With new high density compute nodes this should make the Origin's the fastest supercomputing server per square foot."
Re:Behind the times. (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought enough material had finally invaded the net for people to realize Mhz means nothing... I guess I was wrong.
Let's play what if... cause I don't have any facts on this processor: What if the mov operation of said processor is 1 cycle, whereas mov of pentium is 7?...
Where does that put you?
Books are written on CPUs. pick one up, and you'll understand Mhz means nothing.
Re:too little too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on people. You all root for the Athlon when it is clocked well under the P4, yet you believe that SGI's MIPS line is crap when it tops out at 700Mhz???
Sun's UltraSPARC III Cu tops out at 1.05Ghz last I checked. Does that mean that the P4 at 3Ghz stomps the hell out of it? If you said yes, you are a fucking idiot.
People, the Unix world is far far different from what you are used to in PC land. High speed backplanes, dedicated busses, huge amount of L1 cache, insane L2 cache, incredibly efficient cpu designs (where 1 clock per instruction is pretty much the norm and cache misses don't occur every 3 operations), hot swap damn-near-everything, upwards of 72 processors and 288 GB of RAM...
It all adds up to a fucking badass machine that smacks the piss out of any PC on the planet when it comes to getting its job done. Don't compare apples to oranges. The applications these machines are designed for do not include Quake 3. The benchmarks you have memorized don't mean a damn thing in this realm, so go back home.
Getting back to the article, I'm glad to see SGI coming out with a new CPU. I still see a few SGIs in the wild now and again. If they lock down Irix a bit more security wise and expand their target market, they might be a decent competitor for Sun within the next 10 years. I don't see them winning any shining star awards right off the bat, but if they are persistant they'll do alright in the long run.
So what are the benchmarks? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience SGI's are slow but are extremely scalable. With IA32-based machines you'd be lucky to get 4 CPU's sharing memory, unlike the 64+ you get from SGI. Very good for scientific codes but not so hot for applications that are either not parallelizable at all, or embarassingly parallelizable such as Seti@Home or ray-tracing a feature film.
Re:too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SGI is dying (Score:1, Insightful)
They lost their graphics innovation around the same time nvidia came onto the scene. Now they have serious competition by more than one company in the graphics arena and those companies are fueled by gamers.
SGI has no future. They've been spinning their wheels for the last couple of wheels and they aren't innovating anymore. They might be a target for acquisition, but then again.. who would want them? Since they don't really have a product that is competitive in the fields they sell in, about the only thing they still have are patents.
Someone will get their intellectual property at a huge discount and integrate their NUMA stuff into a system with a better processor and OS.
SGI has no hobbyist program to encourage people to use their hardware.
Look at the open source OS support for their older machines--it sucks.
Old SGI hardware is worthless.
Their Linux efforts exemplify the Achilles heel of SGI. They're divided and indecisive internally, and lose out because of it. They're too small to try to support two architectures and two OS' and the lack of focus just hurts both efforts. Remember their NT machines? That turned out well didn't it. In the end you get the feeling IRIX is the red-headed stepchild that they have a love/hate relationship with.. much like VMS. If you don't know the story of VMS, look it up.
Re:too little too late (Score:1, Insightful)
In other words, shut up troll. Geez I guess now and then people think that by throwing big words like "computation flow dynamics" we may think you are not BSing! Nice try though... BTW, CFD stands for computationAL FLUID dynamics.
And then you bring in the NEC (SX5 I guess) and well jeez I DARE you to post numbers from any nice fortran fd package and compare both the AMD and SX5 results. Jackass....
Re:too little too late (Score:1, Insightful)
The P4 only allows 4-way SMP. Most often you only see 2-way. Big iron scales much much further. Well over 20-way, sometimes 50 or more.
Let's see.
P4 3.0Ghz = 4way x 1085 = 4340
UltraSparc III 1.05Ghz = 20way x 516 = 10320
Of course, the Sparc could scale much further than that even. Plus SpecCPU2000 doesn't account for caches. They only give raw number crunching results. Real world data widens the gap even further.
Re:faster than anything you have used. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:too little too late (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Mhz Muppets (Score:2, Insightful)
For only 4-5 times the price, using a proprietary architecture...
Impressive.
Don't forget, as long as your comparing the latest and greatest, that the P4 3.6GHz (unlike the 2.8GHz you are comparing the MIPS too) is HT. Opps, there goes the performance crown.
I wonder how many GHz Intel will be turning before MIPS manages to achieve 1. Face it, the future is in mass produced chips spinning really fast over sub-optimal instruction sets. Don't like it? Take up music or something. The R16000 is probably the last release MIPS will ever have.
Re:SGI is dying (Score:2, Insightful)
Then you're running small tasks that require little memory, little I/O and don't use much cache, and a substandard compiler. I've got a particle simulation going right now, the Origin 300 with 2 R14000A@600Mhz and 2MB L2 cache and 4GB RAM, using MipsPro compiler, that I have access to outperforms the dual Xeon 1.9GHz with 512kB L2 cache using both VS and Intel's own compiler. The difference in time is measured in days. It's the same thing with a cluster of athlons(And if you run a task where the task isn't easily parallellized, and need to keep in synch with the others, a node crash might ruin a lot of work and force you to start over)
Five Nines? I don't think so... (Score:2, Insightful)
> and even do it better and especially do it much
> cheaper.
I don't buy it. With ix86 PCs, it's not just the software that's crap compared to legitimate enterprise solutions, but the hardware too. Linux is nifty and all, but it only improves the software side. The hardware is still shit.
I've used ix86 boxes from most every builder... from solidly well-built IBM machines, to crap boxes built by dell from commodity parts. Not a one of them has achieved five nines. Remember, that's only five and a quarter minutes of downtime PER YEAR. With most OSs, if you reboot two or three times, that eats up all of your downtime right there, assuming NO other problems.
ix86 boxes just are NOT up to the "five nines" standard. OTOH, I've seen more than a few Sparc, SGI, and RS6000s that can do it.
Remember... just because you CAN do something on the cheap with crap hardware doesent mean that you should. And it doesn't mean that enterprise hardware doesn't have its place.
cya,
john
I/O used to be decent (Score:1, Insightful)
Used to design SGI based systems in 1997 of so.
We used graphicless origin 2000s.
All our workstations were wintel using humingbird eXceed to run our graphics on the SGI.
And we loved them.
Why?
It's the I/O silly. Too date I don't see anything in the intel world that is keeping up with SGI's multi gigabyte packetswitched IO.
That's 1996/7 technology kicking intels 2002 but.
Why oh why hasn't SGI capitized on these strengths????