Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 00:59:26 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET Cc: jgowdy@home.com, seanp@loudcloud.com, lplist@closedsrc.org, kris@obsecurity.org, mwlist@lanfear.com, freebsd@sysmach.com?, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD Message-ID: <F83AHrey7dlGJZNuIkd00004ceb@hotmail.com>
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> Hmmm, isn't there one more thing about the P4 that it uses the >PII's FPU and is less advanced than the PIII's? The P2's FPU /is/ the P3's FPU. The P3 is just a P2 with some new instructions pasted on (SSE) and now with a tweaked L2 cache. Hardly the generational gap between the P1 and the P2. I swear Intel is getting almost 10% as bad as Microsoft--letting the marketing team run the whole company. > Okay, I guess the reason I asked earlier about using PC133 SDRAM >versus DDR is that I have 768MB (3 256MB) PC133 modules already on my >Intel platform and it seems like the DDR has 184 pins versus 168 pins so I >have to make a new investment so that's why I was asking if the >performance hit will be big if I got one of the VIA KT133A chipset >motherboards and ran a AMD 1.33Ghz DDR CPU on it or would that be a big >no? If you have 768MB of SDR RAM don't even touch DDR. DDR may be twice as fast but here in the real world it is only 1% to 10% faster. Hardly a reason to spend hundreds of dollars on more RAM, IMO. Of course you seem to have money so you may just want to go for it. Hell, why not wait for the Tyan dual-Athlon mobo then stick two 1533MHz Palomino Athlons in it and 4 256MB modules. Do a make -j 10 world and don't tell me how fast it goes. > True... I guess what Intel needs is to work on newer stuff in >secret and then all of the sudden just release it rather than having the >entire world expecting some announcement on so and so date.. heh. Then they'd have a great product that just the hardware enthusiasts would know about. It's a marketing world and they have to hype products months (indeed-Years) in advance to get the word out among the 95% of people that don't know Megahertz from megabytes and think Windows is the only game in town--but know that MSword 2010 won't take a week to load if they buy the new whiz-bang Pentium-5. Weird name, BTW. Pentium basically means "five-ium". We are now on the Fiveium-four. Can't wait for the Fiveium-five. > Maybe the Celeron 2 is really just P3's that don't past certain >tests and instead of putting it in the trash or as problem chips, the >marketing department thinks of selling it as a lower end CPU. Remember 486SX's? Intel originally destroyed all 486s the had bad FPUs. They later decided to go ahead and try to market them and, to their surprise, they sold very well. It was only many months later that they actually began making 486s that had no FPUs. In fact, some SX's had WORKING FPU's that had just been disabled to keep up with demand. That said, the Celeron 2's may be dug out of Intel's stock of P3's that had some (not all) bad cache, saved because of the 486SX lesson they learned. Too bad they use another 486 idea today--having only 8K of L1 cache memory on the Pentium IV. If the trend of lowering performance continues, we might see marketing like: "The new Pentium 'VI'--runs the 'VI' editor without long processing delays!" (...Then AMD market's the new AMD EMACS processor) Hmm, ya know I haven't written one word about FreeBSD in the last 10 or so messages. This is getting really bad. Sorry for spamming everyone! _________________________________________________________________ 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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