The problem is that whilst the Regatta has 32 processors and a huge memory bandwidth, your single tasking benchmark will only utilise a tiny fraction of all that power. It will only ever run on one of the POWER4 processors which were introduced in 2001 and run at a now stately 1.1 or 1.3 Ghz.

There is a whole sub-industry devoted to constructing, maintaining and running specialised benchmarks for this kind of hardware to generate headline grabbing numbers. If you could run one of those on your home machine, it would fair very badly by comparison, despite being (I'm guessing) two or three Moore's generations newer hardware.

Generalised hardware benchmarks are generally pretty useless. A slower (Ghz) machine with a top of the range video card will out perform a faster machine with a bad one. Benchmarks only work to the extent that they reflect the realistic operations that they are a substitute for.

And a simple, single-tasking Perl script doing a little repetitive math won't begin to exercise the potential of even a dual-core or dual processor system, let alone the kind of two-cores per die, 4 dies to a card, 4-cards to a box machine like the p690 with its "variable frequency 'distributed switch', wave-pipelined expansion bus".

Its another indication that the future is multi-tasking and that languages that rely on the programmer to partition their algorithms, and use fork and pipes or sockets to distribute and coalesce the data, are doomed to disappear.

Take your prime sieve as an example. It is almost impossible to distribute the processing of a sieve across processors using fork. But its easy to set multiple threads running, that increment the shared candidate counter and then scan the shared sieve array 'striking off' multiples of their candidate.

Not a convicing example? Then consider manipulating very large digital images, say digital X-rays or CAT or PET scans. Or searching and matching huge strings like genome sequences.

Threading is coming, like it or not. It's just a matter of which languages are going to make using them, easiest.

(And sorry for hijacking your question to grind my axe :)

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
"Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."

In reply to Re: System Performance by BrowserUk
in thread System Performance by Massyn

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