[Beowulf] [gregory.brittelle@kirtland.af.mil: Re: Intel?]

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Gregory Brittelle <gregory.brittelle at kirtland.af.mil> -----

From: Gregory Brittelle <gregory.brittelle at kirtland.af.mil>
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:21:04 -0600
To: Apple Scitech Mailing List <scitech at lists.apple.com>
Subject: Re: Intel?
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.730)

Hello,

I cannot believe the things I am reading. I understand that Apple  
Engineers are first Apple employees, but trying to spin this as  
"everything will be OK" is crap. The Intel architecture is simply  
inferior. I read a posting that pointed out Steve Jobs never said  
that Intel was superior to the PowerPC/G5 but rather Intel can can  
deliver the power and speed Apple demands. In what universe has Intel  
EVER delivered on such promises? Perhaps an orthogonal universe where  
dual-core doesn't necessarily mean on the same die and low-power  
means 100+ Watts. Intel bet the farm on hyper-threading (which is a  
complete joke) while IBM and AMD took the hyper-transport path. I  
recall (with a certain fondness, I might add) Dell crying over the  
Spec2000 benchmarks because "they looked at the makefile and hyper- 
threading was disabled." Anyone remember the response? Hyper- 
threading was disabled because the Dell machine ran SLOWER with it  
enabled!

Steve made it clear that it's not all about speed. Perhaps this isn't  
about speed to Steve, but to those of us interested in high  
performance computing, it is about speed. The G5 cluster with the  
velocity engine was an excellent solution - you cannot say the same  
about Intel clusters. The Intel L1 cache sizes are pathetic as are  
the L2 sizes unless one can bring to bear the resources of the seven  
richest kings of Europe...and I for one don't want a Frinkiac-7.

If x86 is the path Apple must go, why not AMD? Kazushige Goto and the  
FLAME project at UT-Austin have produced libraries that SMOKE the  
Intel Math Kernel. By the way, wasn't Intel the company that didn't  
seem to understand IEEE-754 standards from the very first floating- 
point challenged Pentium?

Good thing I spent all that time mastering AltiVec...I can now swap  
stories with all those x86 Assembly programmers at the Orphaned Code  
Expo.

Cheers,
Greg

------------------------------------------------------------
   Gregory E. Brittelle
   Boeing Integrated Defense Systems
------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any
 good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."  -Howard Aiken
------------------------------------------------------------


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