Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750773AbVKDRt6 (ORCPT ); Fri, 4 Nov 2005 12:49:58 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750775AbVKDRt6 (ORCPT ); Fri, 4 Nov 2005 12:49:58 -0500 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:61163 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750773AbVKDRt5 (ORCPT ); Fri, 4 Nov 2005 12:49:57 -0500 Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 09:49:33 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Andy Nelson cc: akpm@osdl.org, arjan@infradead.org, arjanv@infradead.org, haveblue@us.ibm.com, kravetz@us.ibm.com, lhms-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, mbligh@mbligh.org, mel@csn.ul.ie, mingo@elte.hu, nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au Subject: Re: [Lhms-devel] [PATCH 0/7] Fragmentation Avoidance V19 In-Reply-To: <20051104170359.80947184684@thermo.lanl.gov> Message-ID: References: <20051104170359.80947184684@thermo.lanl.gov> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1288 Lines: 33 On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Andy Nelson wrote: > > Ok. In other posts you have skeptically accepted Power as a > `modern' architecture. Yes, sceptically. I'd really like to hear what your numbers are on a modern x86. Any x86-64 is interesting, and I can't imagine that with a LANL address you can't find any. I do believe that Power is within one order of magnitude of a modern x86 when it comes to TLB fill performance. That's much better than many others, but whether "almost as good" is within the error range, or whether it's "only five times worse", I don't know. The thing is, there's a reason x86 machines kick ass. They are cheap, and they really _do_ outperform pretty much everything else out there. Power 5 has a wonderful memory architecture, and those L3 caches kick ass. They probably don't help you as much as they help databases, though, and it's entirely possible that a small cheap Opteron with its integrated memory controller will outperform them on your load if you really don't have a lot of locality. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/