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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 08 2013 @ 02:28 PM EST |
> Rometty delivered a crystal clear message about the new age of
> computing that she envisions will revolve around how well companies
> understand massive amounts of data derived from social networks.
I get a different message from you. I think it doesn't matter if you've
got a R-Pi or an 8-core triple screen gamer's delight, they'll get you,
if not from Farcebook, then from Google+, your eBay purchases, ...
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 08 2013 @ 05:50 PM EST |
First, you're not the target customer. You don't have the data processing
needs; the websites you use do.
Second, a Raspberry Pi may be
interesting technologically, but it is useless at any significant level of
performance requirements. If you watch th
e University of Southampton's video about building a Raspberry Pi
supercomputer, they say it's equivalent to a PII@300MHz in terms of
performance. So a dual-core Core i series at 2+ GHz is going to get about 20
times the performance, when you consider the ISA.
Now, bear in mind
that IBM deals with quad-core or higher Xeons at 3.6+GHz, and 64-bit, typically
multicore, POWER7/POWER8 processors at 3+GHz -- 5.5GHz, with hardware
acceleration for most functions. Bear in mind also that that RPi has ~100mbit
ethernet on a shared usb2.0 hub, and the memory is DDR2 and the disk is a slow
sd card...compared to multiple 10 to 100 gigabit ethernet or
infiniband ports, DDR3 with ECC, and pretty fast HDDs or
SSDs.
That RPi cluster is going to hit a communication limit pretty quick.
Meanwhile, about 80-100 RPi nodes might be equal to one IBM
node. When you've hit your limit, an IBM system would still be too small to
mention. And it can scale to far more nodes, thanks to the superior IO.
If
you're not doing something that parallelizes well, then a cluster won't help
you. In that case, you're dealing with ~a single thread on a 32-bit io-limited,
memory-constrained armv6 computer at ~700MHz (performance equivalent to a 300MHz
686) compared to one on a 64-bit POWER8 computer at 5.5 GHz.
Um, I think
that comparison doesn't bode well for a RPi.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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