The market for those who truly need performance is smaller, better
informed, and more likely able to go with a non-x86 platform (and
non-Windows OS). SMP PowerPC or Alpha could fly, but I expect that
even Beowulf builders will soon find than an extra case, network
connection, and IDE disk won't cost as much as the price premium
for a good SMP motherboard. This will only become more true as
prices in general begin to fall, unless SMP becomes a serious fad...
...and for that to happen, we'd need "commodity-user" applications that
need SMP's computing power (which Intel can't pay people enough to
discover) but are readily parallelizable, talented programmers who
understand how to program for concurrency, and a popular OS and libraries
which were designed with SMP, concurrency, and scalability in mind.
So far the closest we come is that 3D games can readily parallelize
screen redraws...but a Voodoo II board already has such a good frame
rate that you don't even notice SLI at high resolutions any more.
When the masses of parents and others who flock to Best Buy have been
convinced that they want SMP, they will get it...and the commodity SMP
systems will be crap. If you want quality anything, you don't want
the commodity version...not yet, anyway.
Keith
-- "The avalanche has already started; |Linux: http://www.linuxhq.com |"Zooty, it is too late for the pebbles to |KDE: http://www.kde.org | zoot vote." Kosh, "Believers", Babylon 5 |Keith: kwrohrer@enteract.com | zoot!" www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html |http://www.enteract.com/~kwrohrer | --Rebo- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/faq.html