Matthias Scheler wrote:

>Does it? You'll need hell of an Alpha or UltraSPARC system to beat
>a quad Opteron. And at least the UltraSPARC II systems which could
>do that are not supported by NetBSD at the moment.
>
>  
>
Well looking at the mid and high end servers on hp's website shows up 
some serious hardware which is well capable of beating any existing 
Opteron system. Yes it does cost much more than most people could afford 
and NetBSD may not support it, but the hardware is there.
http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/sc_gs.html

>>... I mean it's cursed x86 with 64 bit registers :-) can't be too
>>much of an improvement can it?
>>    
>>
>
>The biggest problem of the x86 architecture were the small number
>of registers. And AMD fixed that in the AMD64 instruction set.
>
>	Kind regards
>
>  
>
I think they have to do more than just increase the number of registers, 
they need to abandon x86, I am not a hardware engineer, but I've read 
that RISC systems perform better than CISC (x86), i.e. designing RISC 
chips and optimizing code for RISC is more straight forward. I think 
that's the reason why Intel want to depricate x86 in favour of EPIC 
Itanium.
By the way if anyone wants to check out Alpha or Itanium systems, have a 
look at http://www.testdrive.hp.com/ You can sign up for a free account 
and then telnet to any of those system and compile and run your own 
benchmarks etc.