Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 22:25:35 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET, lplist@closedsrc.org Cc: jgowdy@home.com, kris@obsecurity.org, mwlist@lanfear.com, freebsd@sysmach.com, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD Message-ID: <F28CdLgT9jeEWWnHg4U00005ada@hotmail.com>
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> Jeremiah has a very good point on the price/performance ratio >since the AMD wins a few times over the Intel's in terms of performance. >I know this might be offtopic but I was looking at the distributed.net rc5 >and the AMD does 3.5 keys/sec per Mhz on the Athlon while the Intel >PII/PIII/Celeron's all do 3.3 keys/sec per Mhz but the PowerPC G4 does >like 8.1 keys/sec per Mhz which seems to smoke the Intel/AMD platforms. >Now, since Mac OSX is out which is based on FreeBSD even though their >kernel is Mach based, would a G4 400 like the Cube be more powerful than a >1Ghz AMD or Intel? The G4 is overall a superior processor to the Athlon, P3 and especially the P4, but there are more factors than that to consider. *If you will be using FreeBSD, you will probably be using GCC. GCC is much more optimized for x86 processors than G4 processors. *Many of the G4's PUs are optimized for efficiency rather than clockspeed. This does make them faster at the same clockspeed, but many times clockspeed ends up being more important. Quick example: The K6 processors have a VERY good branch prediction unit--much better than even the Athlon's--BUT--they were not designed with high clockspeeds in mind and were flaky at above around 600MHz. The G4 also has a much shorter pipeline--same story. *FreeBSD is more mature on the x86 platform. I wasn't even aware of a port to Mac. (If there is one--I am unsure) *Distributed.net uses the FPU much more than the integer units. The G4's advantages in its FPU performance are greater than its advantages in integer performance. You won't get the same amazing results on most applications. If you want to go with a more exotic architecture, go with an Alpha or something. They are vastly superior in almost every way to the above mentioned processors. They are a bit pricey though. Note that the AMD and Intel chips aren't slower because of incompetence. They need to remain backwards-compatible with the 8086 instruction set and some of its methods of doing things. The 8086 processor sucks. It's architecture and design suck. They were never meant for general purpose computing--more for operating dishwashers and the like. The fact that they have advanced so far is a testament to the ingenuity of humanity--and to the stubbornness. Blame IBM. ;-) _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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