I see that the Linux SMP and Linux-Alpha development efforts are both
doing very well. I am looking at the idea of buying a machine soon, to do
some heavy-CPU graphics stuff (raytracing/radiosity and so on). I wonder
whether a Twin Pentium or DEC alpha machine (A 233Mhz DEC Noname PCI
board) would give me the best sheer FP performance.
I realize that performance on a SMP machine is dependent on whether you
can sucessfully parallelize the program, but this is no problem here.
Raytracing is very amenable to this, and I have done a distributed
version of the program.
Also, for the SMP people, is there a SMP Pentium machine available that
has more than 2 CPU's? And, how hardware dependent is the SMP stuff? How
difficult would it be to do a SMP for Alpha?
For the Alpha people, how portable is code between the Pentium (normal OR
SMP) and the Alpha versions. Can I just recompile? How difficult is it to
port other programs (like about anything with source in the Slackware
distrib?) Is the different between Linux/Alpha and Linux/Intel about as
big as beteen, say, SunOS and OSF/1 and HP/UX and so?
Kind regards
Leander
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Leander Conradie MNM-team, TU-Muenchen
conradie@informatik.tu-muenchen.de Barerstrasse 38, G-100
"If you're not programming functionally, you're programming dysfunctionally"