metatron Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 I’ve been looking around Google trying to find a release date for the POWER6 processors from IBM (Scheduled for 2007, up to 6Ghz) as I’m looking to upgrade to my IBM IntelliStation POWER 285 workstation and you hear a lot of love on this forum for AMD and Intel and I was wondering what are your views of the IBM and Sun Processors? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 Cool, but only if you have the money. For most people (including myself) I don't feel that they are flexible and mainstream enough. I would use them if I needed them in a situation which the excelled in, (there was an interested comparion between the Apple G5 and the new Mac Pro and the Mac Pro sucked on quite a few benchmarks). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 I honestly wanted to play with these things, but to the best of my knowledge these workhorses are intended for pumping data from A to B. Pretty much any form of numbercrunching is a bad idea (though those POWERs should be better here). But as these things were always used in high-end gear, so you pay a TON of money to get a box I don't have a particular use for. For home use, there's really not much out there that's remotely affordable outside of x86s and macs. I mean, I'm thinking about creating a HPC cluster. You'd think you could just get some computational nodes. A small board with a CPU on top and a NIC attached is all you need, really. The best I've been able to find that you can use in this way are VIA Mini-ITX boards, and they have integrated everything, 90% of which I won't be using in the first place! You could go with PC104 boards, which tend to be considerably smaller, but those cost more than the ITXes, and have their own weird little requirements. So, the main problem for me is that I can't bring myself to pay top dollar for a machine whose computational competence is rather limited when that's what it's most likely expected to do in my home environment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 I'll admit I don't know much about them, but isn't the archtechture much better than the standard intel/amd stuff? I remeber loads of scientists complaining about the Apple shift to intel because they were using macs to do horredusly complex caluclations for things like partical acclelorators. And the intel kit just wasn't up to the job. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 I'll admit I don't know much about them, but isn't the archtechture much better than the standard intel/amd stuff? I remeber loads of scientists complaining about the Apple shift to intel because they were using macs to do horredusly complex caluclations for things like partical acclelorators. And the intel kit just wasn't up to the job. I wouldn't say the archechture was much better than x86/x64 processors, but they are certainly better for different things. http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2816&p=1 Thats the artical comparing the G5 to the new Mac Pro, it'll give you an idea of how those architectures different. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
degoba Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 I’ve been looking around Google trying to find a release date for the POWER6 processors from IBM (Scheduled for 2007, up to 6Ghz) as I’m looking to upgrade to my IBM IntelliStation POWER 285 workstation and you hear a lot of love on this forum for AMD and Intel and I was wondering what are your views of the IBM and Sun Processors? The sparc processor is slick. We have entire racks of sun servers at school, and they use solaris to teach the unix course for some god awful reason. Sorry in my opinion they should be using something like a combination of freebsd, and linux to teach the unix course. But hey, what the hell do I know. The sparc processors are sexy though, expensive but sexy. If you dont believe me take suns word for it. http://www.sun.com/processors/innovation.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted August 18, 2006 Author Share Posted August 18, 2006 At the moment I favour the currant UltraSPARC as the Power5 is a little behind in someway, which is more noticeable if you’re dealing with multi processor servers but when the Power6 comes out, it should wipe everything else of the board when it comes to most processor intensive tasks. (Video encoding not being one of them) I can’t really say there better then the top of the range Intel and AMD chips, as they are great at lots of things but are not really the best option for the average person. All I can really say about them, if anyone is interested and has the money, is wait for the Power6 and buy a dual processor system and you will not regret it, if you are a UNIX or Linux guy and need something that has an amazing ability to crunch numbers and handle most tasks like it’s nothing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 How much RAM will these things beable to handle? From what I can tell if you use 64bit x86 architecture you can have a maximum of 16GB (am I right?). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted August 18, 2006 Author Share Posted August 18, 2006 The current UltraSPARC can handle 16GB maximum (if you buy an E25K server you can have over 1TB of memory) and the current Power5 can handle 32GB of DDR2 SDRAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 Is that really a limitation of the CPU? Because even on x86 it's more a mobo/memory controller thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 I thought the maximum amount of memory limitation was the fault of the architechture. 32bit x86 only supports 8GB and 64bit x86 supports 16GB, obviusly you have to be using a 64bit OS to make use of all the RAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted August 18, 2006 Author Share Posted August 18, 2006 The UltraSPARC has an on-die memory controller, capable of addressing up to 16 GB of main memory, It’s less of a issue with IBM’s chips. The POWER6 is going to be a beast of a processor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duelus Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 evilement is advacing beyond our capabilities! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PoyBoy Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 Power architectures lick ass. They are RISC based (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), meaning it takes less CPU cycles to do what an Intel can do. AMD is RISC based, as well, which is partly why they kick ass as well. <RANT> AMD will always be better than intel because AMD uses floating point decimal calculations, while intel uses integers, only. Think of it this way: If you had to do all mental math with integers, it would slow you down a bit. Also, Since AMD can do integers as well as decimals, it is much more flexible </RANT> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted August 18, 2006 Share Posted August 18, 2006 Power architectures lick ass. They are RISC based (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), meaning it takes less CPU cycles to do what an Intel can do. AMD is RISC based, as well, which is partly why they kick ass as well. :shock: Reduced Instruction Set Computer. Read it for a minute. Seriously. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
degoba Posted August 19, 2006 Share Posted August 19, 2006 Little bit of cool trivia. Did you know that the lord of the rings was developed on like 600 machines all arranged into a giant linux cluster. It was somthing like that. All I know is that they had a limited budget for that so they used a ton of old computers and a beowulf cluster and vioula. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
armadaender Posted August 19, 2006 Share Posted August 19, 2006 Titanic was done the same way. They were grossly over budget so they clustered a ton of comps and rendered the video that way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
�ïGGer Posted August 23, 2006 Share Posted August 23, 2006 Everytime I see IBM in a story I cant help remembering that the nazis used IBM punch card PC's to manage the concentration camps. They had developed a program that calculated the effeciency of the jewish prisoners and the resulting number was tattooed on the prisoners body, usually on the arm. It has been reported and documented that IBM founder Thomas Watson dealt directly with Adolph Hitler and that he had full knowledge of what the machines were being used for. Here is the web address to a very interesting read. http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/reviews.php Always remember that if we are to forget the horrors of our past we run the risk of repeating them... I love computers and technology in general and would like to see the future in a more positive light but everytime I see IBM it brings back memories of me seeing the crude ink tattoos on my grandparents arms and the sadness in there eyes... Anyway just a quick dose of reality, I hope that you will forgive me... Peace and Love and Technolust... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rFayjW98ciLoNQLDZmFRKD Posted August 23, 2006 Share Posted August 23, 2006 [ size=18][ b]Everytime I see IBM in a ... crap ... Technolust... [/b][/size] OUCH! BIG BLACK LETTERS! Did that make anybody else scroll back to the top of the page Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted August 23, 2006 Author Share Posted August 23, 2006 Everytime I see IBM in a story I cant help remembering that the nazis used IBM punch card PC's to manage the concentration camps. They had developed a program that calculated the effeciency of the jewish prisoners and the resulting number was tattooed on the prisoners body, usually on the arm. It has been reported and documented that IBM founder Thomas Watson dealt directly with Adolph Hitler and that he had full knowledge of what the machines were being used for. Here is the web address to a very interesting read. http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/reviews.php Always remember that if we are to forget the horrors of our past we run the risk of repeating them... I love computers and technology in general and would like to see the future in a more positive light but everytime I see IBM it brings back memories of me seeing the crude ink tattoos on my grandparents arms and the sadness in there eyes... Anyway just a quick dose of reality, I hope that you will forgive me... Peace and Love and Technolust. I don’t give a shit about the Nazis or that IBM sold them things, it was a long time ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moonlit Posted August 23, 2006 Share Posted August 23, 2006 ÃïGGer wrote: [ size=18][ b]Everytime I see IBM in a ... crap ... Technolust... [/b][/size] OUCH! BIG BLACK LETTERS! Did that make anybody else scroll back to the top of the page Yes. Everytime I see IBM in a story...<snip> If you ever post with big black bold letters again I will personally come to your house and perminantly configure all of your broswers to display everything in 6ft high text... I smell flamebait... *sniff* Oh and welcome to the forums, you <You are currently working offline.> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.