Re: Plan 9 grids with AMD64 CPUs

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Vester Thacker wrote:

> Are you more interested in the PowerPC 970 CPU or the UltraSparc III
> processors? I'm just curious.

ppc 970 looks neat but ... try to get info and you will find a web of NDAs 
thicker than the NY phonebook. we've transited that maze, but it's not 
fun. 

Also be careful with the performance numbers, people keep quoting FP 
altivec performance but the DP performance is "a bit" lower. 

There's a lot more to what makes/breaks a processor family than the ISA,
and many considerations are not in the technical realm. Probably one of
the most important things about the 970 is that IBM has released XLC for a
PPC machine. But for the K8, you can get everything -- everything -- about
the CPU and chipset with no NDA at all. That's good. 

That said we like 970 here and will be working with it, but not to the 
exclusion of the K8. 

Of course, I know this question above was aimed at Charles, but could not 
resist.

ron