Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 11:41:04 -0700 From: "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> To: mwm@mired.org Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD Message-ID: <F258Mjg9vOXGbQtF8tB0000401b@hotmail.com>
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>Charles Burns <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> types: > > Xeon is simply a P2 or P3 that has lots of on-chip cache memory and is > > extremely overpriced. > >When I bought mine, Xeon's were also the only P2s - P3s weren't >available yet - that had a cache that ran at the CPU clock speed. The >benchmarks indicated that for many typical Unix applications, the >cache speed was nearly as important as the base CPU speed. My tests >afterwards weren't quite so clearcut, but it ran rings around the >350MHz ultrasparc that I had been considering. > >If I remember correctly, the clock speeds were also the same - the >fastest P2 and the fastest Xeon were both 450MHz. And yes, on-chip >cache is dear. > >The price on P2 Xeon's has fallen to something reasonable, so I've >upgraded those as far as I can - 450MHz with 2M of on-chip cache. With >the recent commentary about the P3 core sucking, I'm wondering if >there's any point in going to P3 Xeons, as the fastest the motherboard >will go is 600MHz. How many CPUs do you need? The Supermicro SQ2E6 supports up to four 700MHz Xeons and uses SDRAM rather than Rambus. You may look into a different mobo if you need a faster server... Might as well if you're buying new Xeons as well. Despite any flaws that the PPro core may have, AMD doesn't really have any truely server class solutions yet. Having lots of cache memory is really only very important for software that has a few MB of code that is used over and over and over, such as the search algorhythms in a database package. Because L2 cache is far faster than going to main memory, the server greatly benefits from being able to keep all or most of the frequently used code within it. (This is probably also the case with compilers, but GCC seems to be more limited by the number of times it can be spawned in a period of time than the amount of time it needs to compile a given .c file) If this isn't news just ignore me. :) _________________________________________________________________ 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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