From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 29 12:02:52 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA06103 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 29 Jul 1997 12:02:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sparkie.gnofn.org (sparkie.gnofn.org [206.27.168.35]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA06097 for ; Tue, 29 Jul 1997 12:02:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sparkie.gnofn.org (sparkie.gnofn.org [206.27.168.35]) by sparkie.gnofn.org (8.7.Beta.10/8.7.Beta.10) with SMTP id OAA25154; Tue, 29 Jul 1997 14:02:07 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 14:02:07 -0500 (CDT) From: Craig Johnston To: Tom Samplonius cc: FreeBSD Mailing List , Rod Ebrahimi , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Pentium II? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Tom Samplonius wrote: > > On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, FreeBSD Mailing List wrote: > > > On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Rod Ebrahimi wrote: > > > > > Recently I was looking into some of Dell's server systems and found that > > > they offer Pentium II 233mhz and 266mhz... I was wondering if anyone had > > > any experience with these types of systems (Pentium II) or knows how they > > > will interact with FreeBSD... > > > > > The PPro is still faster for a true 32-bit OS, primarily due to the fact > > that the L2 is 1:1 with the CPU clock. On the Pentium II, the L2 caching > > is at 1/2 the CPU clock. > > Not, not quite. At the same clock rate, the PPro is faster, but the PII > can operate at 266mhz, while the PPro maxes at 200mhz. > > > The PII runs 16-bit software better and adds MMX extensions, but for a > > network server the PPro will still be faster. > > The PII/266 will be faster than a PPro/200. Not buying into Intel's slot 1 ploy is a good enough reason not to run PII's. Slot 1 is not going to be around very long and I wouldn't count on not running into bugs in the relatively untested slot 1 chipset. The PPro chipset is known to be robust. FreeBSD systems have run stably on it for quite a while now. It just works. Slot 1 is also entirely proprietary -- Intel's response to more competition than it likes from AMD and now Cyrix. The PPro 200 offers all the CPU horsepower you're going to need on a FreeBSD network server. I'd worry about the amount of RAM and the speed, latency, and number of hard drives. SCSI, of course. regards, Craig