On 01/18/11 10:51 PM, Geoff Galitz wrote: > >> Wrong on the demise of the Sparc. Oracle just posted a massively >> record breaking TPC-C benchmark using their new Sparc T3 servers, >> something like 30 MILLION TPM. > Oracle has very publically committed to keeping SPARC strong, which is good > news for those of us believe in diversity in the compute-verse. Even so, > SPARC is also supported by Fujitsu, so as they... "[SPARC's] demise has been > greatly exaggerated." > > >> There's also Power aka PPC, formerly used in Apple Macintosh computers, >> and still used on large scale IBM AIX Unix servers, the Power series. >> These also are very high performance. > Just a minor nit here, POWER is not the same thing as PPC. PPC branched > from POWER with strong influences from other vendors and technologies. PPC > has since evolved into a mostly embedded platform, though later POWER > releases are (mostly) compatible with PPC. the Power6 and Power7 have the altvec and most of the rest of the PPC extensions. when you compile for the power, if you are using gcc, you generally specify ppc as the architecture. With IBM's XLC, of course, you specify Power 4 or 5 or 6 or 7. Power 5 and later have extensive virtualization support native in the hardware, enabling LPAR partitioning of servers. of course, this has nothing to do with centos, as far as I know, RH gave up supporting Power, and Sooshay was the official IBM distribution. with Novell imploding, I'm not sure what happened with Suse.