[Am-info] [OT] I've gone over to the brightly colored side.

[Eric M. Bennett]

Paul Rickard writes:

>      Not to disregarding your argument in the least, but there isn't a
>whole lot of future in a DEC box. And maybe not much in an SGi, from how
>things have looked lately. Especially if all the SGi/IRIX apps will port
>smoothly to OS X and give equal or better performance.

Yes, it's rather depressing to see everything getting overrun by 
Intel.  I'm sitting here rooting for the Hewletts and Packards to 
block the merger (that might save Tru64), but Alpha is dead 
nonetheless.  Still, today it remains well ahead of the performance 
found in PC CPUs.  As for IRIX, well, what *isn't* faster than MIPS? 
Maybe the G4?  :-)

Since there's no OS X version of the Tru64 software I use to do work 
at work, but I got the JTR password cracker to compile on OS X, I 
decided to let my computer at home do the looking for weak passwords 
on the accounts from work.  Running that, the Alphas are 8 times 
faster than my G4.  The Alpha happens to be particularly good at DES 
but even on other things a G4 has a way to go before it reaches the 
level of the Alpha.

Maybe the G5 will be better, but I've been more impressed with IBM's 
POWER chips than anything Motorola has cooked up recently.  Motorola 
doesn't even bother with SPEC benchmarks any more.  They're the only 
mainstream processor maker I'm aware of that doesn't.  There isn't a 
single SPEC2000 number from Motorola in SPEC's database.  SPEC isn't 
perfect but it seems to be about the most useful benchmark set. 
Because of that I've really lost track of how fast the G4 is relative 
to other chips, but everything I've seen suggests the G4 is near the 
bottom of the pack performance-wise, unless you have AltiVec-enhanced 
software.  That doesn't matter for day to day use; I'd rather have a 
nice OS in Mac OS.  But I would hate to be stuck with a bunch of G4s 
for the FP-intensive number crunching I currently run on Alphas.

All the technical software I use at work appears to be headed towards 
Linux (not OS X) as an eventual preferred platform, but the Linux 
versions are rather immature and buggy at this point (and they only 
work on x86 Linux).  For what I use, Linux looks like it has a great 
future.  But it has no present.

-- 
Eric Bennett / ericb@pobox.com / emb22@cornell.edu
Cornell University, Chemistry & Chemical Biology

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Ben Franklin