On 11/7/06, Alan McKinnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You seem to know enough about these matters already to make a sane judgement, so you probably already know that the real answer to your question is "it depends". Here's what I would do: pop along to your local store, preferably not one of the big chains, find the sanest sales guy with a clue and explain your problem. Don't listen to his recommendations, just ask if you can test his demo machines with the actual app in question. If it's an owner run store he probably say yes. Then test the thing for real and measure progress after 30 minutes or so. Buy the best performer. This will take a while, but at least you'll know for real which one suits your needs best alan
Thanks Alan. The problem with running the neural network app is that it's a huge install under Windows. It requires Internet access as it has a hardware key that has to be validated against the specific machine. Probably takes 1 hour just to set up. Then, once it's set up it takes maybe 15 minutes to run a single solution on my older Athlon XP 1600+. With that as background I'm sure you can understand that I'm not anxious to do it more than once or twice. What I was hoping to do was find some basic way of comparing the BogoMIPS on my old Athlon XP machine with BogoMIPS on some new machines at the dealer. They haven't had any problems in the past with me bringing in a LiveCD and booting Linux. If I could do this then I might estimate that the new machine will run the same speed or will run 3X the speed when doing these neural network jobs? Here's some info on the machines in my house today: 1) A 3GHz P4HT machine we use as a MythTV backend server and desktop machine: processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 3 model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz stepping : 3 cpu MHz : 2995.346 cache size : 1024 KB <SNIP> bogomips : 5996.11 processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 3 model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz stepping : 3 cpu MHz : 2995.346 cache size : 1024 KB <SNIP> bogomips : 5990.25 2) My son's AMD Compaq low cost machine: processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 47 model name : AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3200+ stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 1803.767 cache size : 256 KB <SNIP> bogomips : 3611.84 3) 1 of 2 Pundit-R's used as Myth frontend machines: processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 3 model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.26GHz stepping : 4 cpu MHz : 2261.847 cache size : 256 KB <SNIP> bogomips : 4526.57 4) My AMD64 Gentoo machine is use daily: processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 47 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ stepping : 0 cpu MHz : 1809.286 cache size : 512 KB <SNIP> bogomips : 3619.63 5) The current Athlon XP Windows machine is busy running Trading Solutions but when in Linux I *think* it has a BogoMIPS spec around 2800. No way to verify that right now. It's pretty boring but it seems that you can sort of double the CPU MHz spec and come pretty close to the BogoMIPS numbers. However that doesn't take cache size into account so maybe BogoMIPS isn't even the right thing to be looking at. At the root of it all my questions are: 1) How representative are BogoMIPS in determining how fast a machine will eventually be on compute bound apps? 2) Are there any good listings of BogoMIPS on different processor types and speeds? (This is what I really want....) 3) Do BogoMIPS include FPU measurements in case that is important for my app? 4) How well do BogoMIPS translate to the same machine when it runs Win XP? Anyway, thanks very much for your answers. I appreciate the help even if it isn't primarily about running Gentoo. I suspect there are others out there that have to dual boot. Maybe this will help someone in the future with similar questions. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
