4 ms·
Sure. Specint and the more modern specintrate are obvious choices for “we can’t suck at this”. But the overall architecture was so extremely over “int heavy” th
by boulos 6y ago
Sure. Specint and the more modern specintrate are obvious choices for “we can’t suck at this”. But the overall architecture was so extremely over “int heavy” that the box was just not great for the supercomputing segment it claimed to want to play in.
Maybe large Oracle databases, too?
The architecture really was the only game in town for a while for having so many physical memory address bits. I just assume someone “resold” it to the HPC/supercomputing groups as “here, go sell this”.
- bonzini 6y agoNot as bad as Niagara, that thing had what, 1 FPU shared by eight cores? Great for Java, a bit less for PHP that only had floating point arithmetic...
- boulos 6y agoPoor Niagara :). The Niagara design though was clearly intended for web serving/databases and Sun didn't go try selling it into the LINPACK/supercomputing segment. That's the disconnect for me. To be clear, if you had a multi-hundred processor system sitting around (as we kind of did, thanks SGI!), you used it. But... you probably shouldn't have purchased it.