On Wed, 28 May 1997, John Burwell wrote: > On the way home from college graduation, some good buddies in Memphis > opted to steal my car loaded with my nearly new Pentium Pro 180 > workstation. Needless to say, I loved this computer, but now I am > faced with replacing it.
Ouch! > I have been exploring a number of possibilities for replacement, and > have discovered that a Tyan Dual PPro 150 mhz MB costs exactly the > same as an Intel Venus PPro 200 mhz MB(I had a Venus PPro 180 > previously. In a multitaking environment, I can see where the dual > processors could outperform a single processor of greater speed. I > am leaning towards the dual with this logic in mind .. I was > wondering if anyone could see in a ny falws in my logic here .... My observations have tended to be that duals are for extremely processor intenisive things that can fit in the onboard cache or for people who really need more speed than a PPro-200 can give. The trick is that right now on intel machines ram is terribly slow compared with the processor. A PPro-200 without a cache would spend all of it's time waiting for the memory, with a cache it can run at it's internal speed most of the time. Now, as you start adding more CPU's with SMP the amount of bandwidth the memory needs to supply to the processor increases. If you already had saturation of your memory then adding more processors will not do to much for you. Dual PPro's usually see about 1.3-1.8 times the speed depending on the task and the benchmark. This is the same reason a Pentium 200 is not twice the speed as a Pentium 100, memory bandwidth. Dual Pentiums are nasty, they usualy get about 1.1-1.5 only :< If you are serious on speed then look at some of the upcoming chips, Intel has indicated we will see a 300Mhz Pentium II soon, AMD has the K-6 (it is supposed to be able to beat the PPro-200 fairly easially) and Cyrix is going to come out with the M2 which looks hot as well. It looks like Intel is going to let the PPro's go away, the dual die design proved to be too expensive I guess. Pentium II is the new High End Super Duper chip. > Also, how have the Tyan boards been under Debian?? How strong is the > SMP support under Linux?? I have a colleage running a Dual PPro 200 > with nice results(I think ..) ... I've never tried on in Debian, but Tyans are excellent boards in alot of different ways. I saw an article in a EMI mag about how the Tyan boards had excellent power filtering (some un-named other brands do not properly filter to Intel's spec). I know alot of people swear by these boards. Jason -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
