From: Peter Farrow peter@farrows.org

looks like the 4500 came second to me by a fair margin, between 3x and 5x faster best case,

"Best case" would be something that scales linearlly over many processors with minimal (<0.1GBps) inter-CPU interconnect, which is exactly what a cluster (using GbE) is.

In other cases, the old UltraSPARC II was able to keep within ~60% or so, and that's not even looking at the fact that it only had 2GB -- which _each_ dual-P4 node had as well.

not what Iwould call limping away. Anyway that's enough of this thread, kill it now.....

Here's my final statement.

I have never debated that the P4 isn't more capable than old UltraSPARC II processors when something clearly relies on ALU/FPU. Heck, I _still_ deploy refurb/unused dual-P3 850MHz-1.4GHz systems because of this (especially when interconnect is not the bottleneck).

But there _are_ cases where a more capable interconnect is what is needed. In those cases, even some older, cheap UltraSPARC II NUMA/UPA platforms are very useful. E.g., we're currently using a 8-way UltraSPARC II as our near-line/ off-line disk/tape backup server, and it's using multiple out-of-band and storage interconnects.

Now yes, a 4-way HP DL585 would have been much nicer, and even far more interconnect. But it's clearly better than a 2-way P4 for what we're using it for.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org