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Date:      Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:22:26 -0700
From:      Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com>
To:        thierry.herbelot@alcatel.fr
Cc:        mholloway@flashmail.com, questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: AMD or Intel?
Message-ID:  <37600262.97B851C6@3-cities.com>
References:  <375f4aae.17f.0@flashmail.com> <375F75A7.7A8C2082@telspace.alcatel.fr>

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Thierry Herbelot wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> you may just wait a little and get an "official" SMP board with two
> celerons-400 for the same price as your P-II 400 (check Abit and QDI for
> info and look at Tom's Hardware)

One thing to consider is the memory. The Celeron uses PC-66 and the P-II
400 uses PC-100. When I run setiathome on a Celeron 433 with 64 MB and
on two P-II 400 systems running NT4+ with 128MB, I get work unit times
of 15hrs for the Celeron and 9:50 to 10:50 on the NT machines. There is
a graphic display that goes with the NT version of setiathome and
execution time varies a factor of 3+ depending on whether you have
blanked the display or not. It is run as the screensaver and I am
blanking the display. If I don't blank the display a WU requires as much
as 35 hours. Setiathome on FreeBSD as I write this is showing 35.3hrs
and 99.02% CPU on top. I haven't been doing anything for a couple of
days on FreeBSD so the system is just sitting there running setiathome
instead of chewing up idle time. At this point, I think the only
difference in WU times is the 100Mhz memory on the P-II's. The Celeron
is not supposed to use 100Mhz memory at this point. I think that is
scheduled for the Celeron 500. The speeds ending in 33 or 66 and the 400
use the 66Mhz bus. I have more than enough memory on all three systems
to run setiathome. It is a pure computation program and CPU speed and
access to memory would be the primary throttles on performance.

I think you would get more throughput with two Celerons but each single
threaded job would run slower than on the P-II 400. I also think that it
takes a special program to use memory that intensively and most programs
would never see it, since the on-board cache is clocked faster on the
current Celeron's than on the P-II.

Kent

> 
> This seems the best combination with a decent OS (it should still work
> with Wincrap98)
> 
>         TfH
> 
> "Mark L. Holloway" wrote:
> >
> > I'm looking do get another PC for my FreeBSD dektop workstation (ie not serving).
> >
> > For $189 I can get an AMD K2-450 and Motherboard.
> > For $379 I can get an Intel 400 and Motherboard.
> >
> > I've heard the AMD has a weak FPU but as soon as you hit PIII the price jumps
> > way too high (since I won't use the PIII extensions).  Any advice?  Is the AMD
> > still a good cpu?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Mark
> > ______________________________________________________
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> 
> --
> Thierry Herbelot <thierry.herbelot@alcatel.fr>
> Phone : (+33) 1 46 52 47 23
> Home Page : http://perso.cybercable.fr/herbelot
> 
> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com
http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html

SETI @ Home (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/


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