Somebody buy me this ARM mega-desktop machine :-)

Forget the cute but tiny Pi 3B+ running at a mere 1.4GHz with a puny 1Gb RAM. Feast your eyes upon the mighty Cavium ThunderX machine from avantek.co.uk
Whilst it is very configurable, a nice basic developer machine with a single 32-core v8 1.6GHz CPU, 32Gb RAM, half-gig SSD, Gb ethernet, FirePro graphics etc is a mere GBP 1850 - call it US$2500. For a comparison that's what ParcPlace paid in 1994 to get me a 70MHz ARM710 workstation with a colossal 4Mb ram.

Or of course you could go for the US18000 dual-32-core 2.2GHz etc version, but that's possibly going a bit over the top. The 384-core server model is definitely a bit much :-) Or is it?

At a fairly wild guess based on benchmark comparisons for other languages, I suspect each core would probably run Squeak about as fast as a ~2.5Hz intel i7. So, somebody wanting a fast 64-bit ARM VM should really consider the possibilities ...

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Oxymorons: Advanced BASIC

Hi Tim--

> Forget the cute but tiny Pi 3B+ running at a mere 1.4GHz with a puny
> 1Gb RAM. Feast your eyes upon the mighty Cavium ThunderX machine from
> avantek.co.uk. Whilst it is very configurable, a nice basic developer
> machine with a single 32-core v8 1.6GHz CPU, 32Gb RAM, half-gig SSD,
> Gb ethernet, FirePro graphics etc is a mere GBP 1850 - call it
> US$2500. For a comparison that's what ParcPlace paid in 1994 to get me
> a 70MHz ARM710 workstation with a colossal 4Mb ram.

     Wow, that's USD 4227 today[1]...


-C

[1] https://tinyurl.com/y8g8mqh2 (dollartimes.com)

--
Craig Latta
Black Page Digital
Amsterdam :: San Francisco
[hidden email]
+31   6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
+ 1 415  287 3547 (no SMS)

> On 06-05-2018, at 2:08 PM, Craig Latta <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>     Wow, that's USD 4227 today[1]...

I'm actually surprised it's that little; a few years ago I worked out  the UK inflation factor for my life up to then (maybe 6-7 years ago?) and it was a scary x17. Even scarier was the UK inflation in house prices which was just under x170!!!  Even the first house Bridget & I bought in Winchester in 1984 recently sold for 13x what we paid for it. And the entire building would fit in our current living room.

The pricing of compute power and other electronic stuff is astonishing. An ESP8266 is about the same performance as the ARM workstation from 1994 and costs roughly one tenth of what a floppy disk[*] (not the drive!) cost back then.

tim
[*] For the younger readers of this list, a floppy disk was a flexy plastic mini-frisbee coated in crushed rust that was spun round and rubbed under a magnetic sensor to provide a primitive form of digital storage. Yes, it was as silly as it sounds.
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers or have an unusual number of heads

> On 06-05-2018, at 2:59 PM, Ben Coman <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 7 May 2018 at 05:26, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers or have an unusual number of heads
>
> But did you know, that alien civilisations with two fingers less than us still say they count in base 10 ?

Who have you been talking to, squishy human? Tell me now before the silent ones get to you!

tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: RDLI: Rotate Disk Left Immediate