64 bit RISC PROCESSOR(MULTI THREADING ARCHITECTURE)

[Barry Otieno]

Thanks guys.Am looking for a server soln that will have the above processor or equivalent,scalable to 4 processors and atleast 2.1Ghz.Also to be able to have 3 SAS drives.Should have 64-bit Linux OS support.Initially i thought of an rx6600 Intergrity but am not sure.Please assist

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Your subject is not sufficient in identifying a processor architecture.

64 bit - all new server-class processors are 64-bit these days. Itaniums were 64-bit from the very beginning of the design series.

RISC processor - once upon a time there were two opposite schools of thought in processor design: RISC and CISC. Most current processors are "hybrids" between the two, so this categorization is becoming obsolete.
(However, "PA-RISC" is a specific name for a particular processor architecture built by HP. Please avoid confusing the two terms.)

Multi-threading - this is an Operating System feature, not a processor feature.

The clock speed of the processor is applicable when comparing different processors of same architecture and design series, but not so useful when comparing different processor architectures.

(Even within the X86 architecture, AMD's processors with slower clock speed did beat Intel's Pentium 4 series a few years ago. After that, Intel abandoned Pentium 4 design line and developed new, very successful designs from the Pentium M line.)

So... I guess you are looking for a 64-bit server that runs Linux and is faster than some undefined x86 processor at 2.1 GHz, right? In that case, rx6600 might be a good choice.

If this is your first experience outside the x86 architecture, remember that you will need native Itanium/Linux versions of all performance-critical software. Linux on Itanium can run old 32-bit Linux/x86 software using an emulation layer, but it is not as fast as using native code.

If you have the source code for your software and it's already usable on Linux and 64-bit clean, it's just a matter of recompiling it for Itanium.

MK

[Dennis Handly]

>MK: once upon a time there were two opposite schools of thought in processor design: RISC and CISC. Most current processors are "hybrids" between the two, so this categorization is becoming obsolete.

CISC is still CISC, it may have RISC like instructions.
But RISC is still RISC, it can't have complex instructions.
Then there is EPIC used in Itanium.

>Multi-threading - this is an Operating System feature, not a processor feature.

Or call it hyperthreading.

[rick jones]

> or call it hyper-threading

when you mean the HW feature and multi-threading when you are talking about SW :)