I'm afraid it's even worse than that. I haven't looked up the design specs on the web or anything, but I believe the Daystar design is quite poor in a number of ways, some of them not really in their control. First, it's not SMP, it's really AMP, or Asymetric MP: only processor 0 gets interrupts. The processor affinity algorithms in the 2.2 kernel, lame as they are, cause poor performance on this kind of MP architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if 2.0 kernels, which had almost no processor affinity code, would show better scaling on these systems. Secondly, only one processor at a time may use the bus off the daughter card, and are multiplexed by bus transaction, not by bus cycle. L2 cache thrashing is a definite possibility. But the worst part is that the 604e is but a very pale shadow of the 604, with it's half wide data and address busses and basically non-existent L1 caches. It's specmark numbers for a 200 are below those of a 200MHz PentiumPro. So, yes, your 650 Athlon, what with 133 or 200MHz memory bandwidth, would spank that snot out of a 4 way 604e @ 150MHz.
With almost no disk accesses, my dual 200MHz 604e compiles a certain kernel config achieving only about a 50% scaling, which is down right pitiful, but better than nothing! My dual SparcStation20 and my dual celeron system achieve greater than 95% scaling on the same kind of [fairly silly] test. Such is life. a Peter Cordes wrote: > > On Fri, Apr 06, 2001 at 09:41:50AM -0400, Matthew Grant wrote: > > I am trying to get Debian 2.2 on a 9600/200MP. > > When I reboot I get the Disk with the X in it. Which means I > > need to configure My boot loader. I can't get into OF I get a > > black screen. > > > > I boot with the floppies and go to a shell I mount my root > > partion (/dev/sda3) to /target and run ybin -b /dev/sda3. > > It tells me there's no config file. or it tells me it's not a > > HFS file system. > > > > I am used to Lilo and debian on i386. would some one give me a > > clue on what steps I am suppose to do to configure yaboot. > > If I am doing this ass backwards send me a Link to were I can > > learn the PowerPC way. > > Problem number one: the 9600 is an oldworld machine. You can't use yaboot. > If you're planning to dual boot, then use bootx. Otherwise, use bootx for > now, until you figure out quik. (I've had good luck with BootX on my > Daystar Genesis MP, which is similar to your system I guess. BTW, I've > found that compiling kernels isn't nearly as fast as I hoped it would be > with 4 PPC604 CPUs at 150MHz. I think the problem is that they share the L2 > cache, and it isn't big enough to keep 4 gcc processes happy. That, and the > limited memory bandwidth/latency bring it down. My Athlon 650 is about 5 > times faster at compiling. Both machines have 128MB of RAM. The pmac has > old (but decent) SCSI disks.) > > -- > #define X(x,y) x##y > Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X([EMAIL PROTECTED] , ns.ca) > > "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! > Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack > my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
