[Info-vax] Chiphead News: Intel announces new Kaby Lake processors

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-09-01, IanD <iloveopenvms at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Linux has always been fast because it is lean and OpenVMS the slow
> beast except for a brief time when Alpha ruled the world

File I/O certainly, and the kernel folks are doing a lot of work on
speeding things up in various areas.

But ask yourself if you are falling for marketing when you say "Linux
has always been fast".

Anecdotal evidence:

a) Going back a decade or so, my PWS 600au running VMS could do LAME
conversions (MP3 <-> WAV IIRC) on CD sized files, about 3 times faster
than the 600 Mhz iBook I had.  The VMS system let me do other work at
the same time, the iBook performed like a complete slug for other work
during the conversion.  Yes, the 1996/7 PWS probably had better memory
bandwidth etc than what was a 2002 consumer level laptop, but the VMS
scheduler was clearly superior to the one on OS X.

b) In early 2012 I grabbed a VMware Workstation 30 day trial. This
allowed me to use either Linux or Windows as a host, so I tried both.
With the latest flavour of Ubuntu available at that time, the system
basically fell apart under heavy I/O load, but Windows Server 2008
behaved impeccably (everything got slow, but still worked).  The problem
on Ubuntu appeared to be scheduler orientated but I didn't manage to get
any hard figures on that.

BTW a good way to thrash Windows is to run a Windows Installation in a
VM while a Windows Server backup is running :-)

In contrast, the main benchmarks that the Linux file system folks were
looking at back then involved either unpacking the kernel sources or
creating vast numbers of files, often empty files at that.  Neither
matched the quite simple "real life" scenario I created with a VM
installation concurrent with a backup :-(

> I'm really looking forward to seeing how OpenVMS behaves against linux
> when the two OS are running on the same bit of silicone. 

Me too.  I'll admit to being something of a vandal when it comes to
creating hefty workloads which push the boundaries. :-)

> I know to start with, OpenVMS will be pretty much a straight port (at
> what specific processor I wonder?) and will not be optimised to take
> advantage of the latest and greatest offerings from Intel / AMD but in
> the years ahead, it will be interesting to see if any of the OpenVMS
> internal design enables OpenVMS to pull ahead of linux in certain
> areas? (speaking from a total lack of linux internal knowledge of
> course!)

If you had asked me a few years ago I would have said that the VMS
scheduler was likely to beat Linux, but with the work that has gone
into supporting multiple cores etc on Linux since, I am no longer
so sure.

-- 
It was untidy, so got unplugged.
It was unplugged, so got thrown away.