thus John R Pierce spake: > 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, No, they didn't. RHEL6 is available for IBM Power: http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Release_Notes/introduction.html > and Sooshay was the official IBM distribution. > with Novell imploding, I'm not sure what happened with Suse.