[tortoise]

Feh. Apple needs to focus on the important basics, like an integrated memory controller, a decent ccNUMA implementation, and similar (i.e. all the stuff the Power-series processors have). If you don't have these, partitioning is just a marketing buzzword side-show. Vastly superior system architecture is why the Opterons mop the floor with the PPC970 when it comes to enterprise server ops (and most supercomputing benchmarks) despite the fact that they nominally run at about the same instruction dispatch speed.

Less shiny wrapping and more meat please.

[antiRepublicrat]

Apple needs to focus on the important basics, like an integrated memory controller, a decent ccNUMA implementation, and similar (i.e. all the stuff the Power-series processors have).

From the interviews I've read with POWER and PPC970 engineers, it's clear that the current PPC was rushed to market, leaving off certain features -- they didn't even manage to get the most modern vector processing unit in the chip in time. And the 970FX was just a power-saving version of the original 970.

So I don't think they'd bring an LPAR-capable PPC970 to market, adding that much technology to the chip, without bringing the memory controller back on board, which was technology in the original chip it was derived from in the first place. It'll be a really stupid move if they do.

[Swordmaker]

Vastly superior system architecture is why the Opterons mop the floor with the PPC970 when it comes to enterprise server ops (and most supercomputing benchmarks) despite the fact that they nominally run at about the same instruction dispatch speed.

Is that why the first Opteron Supercomputers on the 500 Fastest list are in 17th and 18th place with 2560 processors and the Apple PowerPC is in 7th place with 2200??? 2/3rds the speed with 1/6th more processors...

Or how about the new 3132 Apple cluster at COLSA Corp. that would come in fourth if it had been running when the tests was made in November?

The 28th position supercomputer is another Opteron that does have the same number of processors as the Virginia Tech installation and it runs less than 50% of the speed...

That doesn't sound like "mopping the floor" to me.