Power 7 CPU - 8 cores

[KimmoK]

Power 7 is generations more advanced than the CPU in the X1000, hell my power 5 box would run rings round it.

If I'm not mistaken, PA6T is a mobile PPC970 ... and IIRC, PPC970 is a Power6 stripped and modified for desktop?

So it is not generations behind, even if it runs circles around (PA6T might be better in performance per watt).



Other than that...
Nice to see that Freescale is finally doing something with the PPC. But as long as our niche OSs use only one core and one thread, we would get some 4000MIPS from a 130 000MIPS T4 chip. (would be like using dos in i7 system)

[KimmoK]

Any CPU engineer will tell you instantly we have hit the wall and all this multi-core desktop CPU stuff is just a scam really. The maximum number of cores without losing efficiency of code execution is effectively 3. Not 4 not 8 but 3. You can not utilise much more than this without actually starting to waste cycles of CPU time delaying/setting up use of threads to run on other cores. ....For desktop computers 3 or 4 is about it. So Moore's law is f**ked well and trully unless we start seeing 5 and 6ghz CPUs QUICKLY!

It depends on desktop's use how it can share load. Some applications can split their doings to hundreds of small items to be processed parallelly, while some other taks run fastest in one pipe. Some jobs can even be split to SIMD and shader units of the system.

Easy to share/split are: renderings, video encoding, compiling, etc... Even I have used ten CPUs clusters that work very well indeed.

Latest TCOM chips have 32 cores, perhaps more. And on workstations you see things like multiple i7 chips on one motherboard. They are there because they work.


And finally... latest overclocked CPUs run faster than 9Ghz. Even if you can buy only 5Ghz parts from (IBM) shop.

[KimmoK]

Honestly everyone goes on about AmigaOS vs Windows 7/8 but frankly AOS does absolutely nothing in comparison to it. If, and it's obviously a hypothetical if, AmigaOS development had continued in parity with Windows and x86 over the years then we'd all be whining about the same things. It's not some wonder-CPU-architecture that made AOS usable, it was simply because it was extremely primitive compared to modern operating systems.

Windows has a lot of features (and people really use 1% of them) but M$ has failed in basic things.

AOS is primitive? To modern standards, perhaps. But AOS is flexible and simple. To me it seems to offer enough to do all desktop tasks on top of it, we mainly need the SW on top (and to ease up the SW development we need some things to OS). Unless AOS is totally being broken by it's implementators, I doubt it will ever be as sluggish as the mainstream. (not even memory protection should break responsiveness, it has been demonstrated by RTOSs)

[KimmoK]

I had more frequent and severe crashes running Linux than I've ever had running XP. Didn't boot any faster, either.

On some of my x86s some windows did not even manage to install itself, etc, etc. Linux went in far more smoothly. Booted faster and was stabler.
I think I've had thousand crashes with windows and only a few with linux (+ perhaps hundred crash of the Linux desktop GUI, that really is not linux fault).
And modern linux remembers what you had running when you powered off, it can restore your work's state pretty nicely.

(latest win crash happed just 2 hours ago with my work laptop, when I lift up the lid of the laptop, bluescreen gave me it's warm welcome. and yesterday the laptop just locked up when IE was used, hard power off worked. I know people blame idiotic IT support, but without M$ there would be no need for such a IT support.)

Modern linux main distros seem to require more than 4Ghz of computing power. I've forced to move to lighter desktops, like LXDE and Enlightenment.


Nice to see Linux getting in places also at work. Even Beaglebone HW is in the lab handling various I/O things and routing.