[dundee] Opinions on the Sun Ultra 24 Box - Good bang-per-buck?

[Andrew Clayton]

On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:54:29 +0100 (BST), Lee Hughes wrote:

> yeah, but will the software (os/app's) take advantage of all that
> threading capability?

I'll use the terms cores and cpu's interchangeably below..

Of course. Linux itself is quite capable of dealing with many cpu's,
with support for 4096 cpu's currently being worked on for merging from
the folks at SGI.

You want real world examples,

Compiling is an obvious one with make supporting parallel compiling
natively, e.g make -j <num cpu's + 1>

If you use a source based distribution, you'll like many cores...

Saw a recent reference to an IBM machine that does 3K/sec (that's 3
kernel builds a second)

Grip supports multiple cpu's for encoding audio.

I'm sure games will start supporting multiple cores, in fact IIRC some
version of quake does/did.

Any java app you use...

And just having the capacity that comes from having multiple cores,
video encoding not interfering with your compilation for example.

That heavy javascript site causing firefox to hammer one of your cores.

So yeah, Linux has been ready for this for a long time and as multiple
cores become more prevalent, I'm sure more apps will be written
specifically to take advantage. 

> I'd personally go for something like this.
> 
> single core....but over clock the hell out of it...

I don't think overclocking is a good idea, especially under Linux, you
may get away with it under Windows, but Linux generally pushes the
hardware harder as it is and overclocking could cause random oopses,
panics and lockups. 
 

Andrew