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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (69593)	1/30/2002 8:58:22 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Tench: The key is both the software and the hardware. That is systems design. Of course you forget all of the coding used in the CPU node interconnect, the drivers of same in the OS, the OS's VM system and all the other necessary things to make a working NUMA system. When you take the hardwrae of a four way Xeon box and run DOS on it, it is not an SMP system, now is it? The system is the hardware and the software working together. All that is truly different is the dividing lines between the hardware and the software and where they are placed. The eight Duron system you mention properly configured and programmed with say Beowulf Linux would outrun any 8 way P4 box running DOS 2.11 no matter what clock it is at. The Microway system would run even if someone put a bullet through the northbridge of any node. However the same act on an 8 way Xeon system crashes it. The cluster is actually more robust than the shared memory system and thus, is more desirable to a discerning customer all else being equal. Given the current price and performance differences, the cluster is heavily favored. Pete