> Some of the "low end" 64 bit machines are not any more expensive than a
> quad xeon can run.
Are you sure? That might be the case if you use the most over-priced
Xeon system you can find....
>
> A quad 1GHz Power4 with 8 gig ram, dual 36 Gig drives and all the
fixings
> goes for $44,000. That's with 64 Meg L3 cache.
Wowee. That's a lot of money. You can build a quad Xeon with the same
trimmings for a QUARTER of that price. Will the Power4 provide four times
the performance?
MB, chassis, triple power supply: $4,000
4 x 2.4 GHz P4 Xeon CPU's: $1,200
8 gigs RAM: $3,000
2 x 15k 36 gig HDD: $800
------------
Total: $9,000
Of course, the limitting factor in PG seems (to me, at least) to be
I/O, not CPU power. In a shared-bus sort of arrangement with 4
processers, I think you'll generally run out of I/O (whether it be from
the disks, memory, or the CPU bus) long before you'll run out of CPU.
Once you get above the level of performance that an Intel or AMD system
can provide, then your relative cost (based on performance) goes up pretty
steeply - but since there aren't any other options, you're pretty much
stuck with it.
steve