🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7ikd09$cfi$1@sparcserver.lrz-muenchen.de>,
  kuhn@lpr.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de.nospam wrote:
> In comp.os.linux.hardware Totally Lost <idletime@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> : There are a number of applications that will benefit from
> : dual Celerons. The warning, is that a number of app's will not,
> : and may even perform worse. For those that are able to learn
> : from other experiences, this is a valuable heads up.
>
> A normal single-CPU home-system is about $1000. for an additional $150
you
> get a potential speedup of 100% (in real life somewhere beetween
> 60-80% when the application takes effekt of the second CPU)
> To have the same PII power that would about $700, and the speedup
> maybe 70-90% - of course, always depending on the application.
> 10-20% more speed for 50% more money? Only if i need it!

Ok, we'll use your numbers... $1000 system, with an additional $150
that is 15% more, not 50% more, for that you get a 10-20% speed up,
a very small part of the time (doesn't speed up editing, backups,
installs, web browsing, or most other single command activities that
we occupy our time with in front of the computer). It does however
speed up a few tasks that some people do frequently.

I suspect that if the human wait time was more carefully analyzed
across the spectrum of users, that reductions on Disk I/O or network
connectivity would have have a bigger payback. For most people,
an additional $150 spent on a faster disk subsystem would save them
a lot more time than the meger saving of a dual processor. Or in many
cases, simply selecting the next faster uniprocessor model which would
shave a little off every activity, not just multi-process ones.

> : Did you try SpecWeb, NetBench, WebBench
> : or TCP-C benchmarks which by most industry standards represent a
> : "heavy load"?
>
> Not yet. Please give me the URLs for those, and i will do them.

If you have to ask that question, I suspect you can neither afford
them or have the skills to install and run them to get meaningful
results.

> I was talking about the Brain-Dead intel-Architecture inside
> and outside the CPU! (Even with a MC68000/8 you can
> stand harder real-time requirements than with an PIII/500
> - application depended)

I'm not that fond of IA32, it's kinda haphazard. But it's far
from Brain-Dead.

I've done several Motorola hardware designs with MC68008 and MC68020
chips myself, and worked on quite a few more. There are parts of IA32
that are not pretty, but there is nothing to back up your absolute
claim here. Polling both have similar latencies, the PIII/500
is a lot faster. Interrupt latencies are a little more predicable
with the Motorola products, but in terms of absolute margins, the
faster external bus clock cycles of the PIII/500 wins hands down.

Since you made the claim, please explain yourself.

> Have a look at AXP, Sparc, MIPS and maybe PowerPC-based machines.
> those i would say are real computers :-)

I own SGI's plus both M68K and PPC Mac's, and have done system level
work on Sparc's as well. The Risc architectures on the Sparc, MIPs and
PPC is just as twisted as IA32, and a lot less open. The M68K arch
never evolved far enough to deliver any real performance by today's
standards. In the end it's not the instruction set, bus architecture,
or glue logic that really matters, it's what the end users can see and
do with a system.

From that perspective, Intel is at least as good, if not the hands
down winner, at providing a usable computer into a wide range of
computing and non-computing professionals.

> But for what i (and many others) am doing at home, the celerons
> are the better choice!

That's every buyers choice to make for themselves ... and hopefully
an informed choice at that. Blanket recomendation of one particular
techology with a total disregard to the application is folly. Hence,
my warning that dual celerons might provide a good bang for the buck
for certain users, but *DO* not blindly accept that they are fast
for everyone, or even a reasonable cost/performance tradeoff for most
people. In general, I strongly assert they are a poor choice for most
server applications, given that for a few percent more there are better
PII/PIII/Xeon uni/multi-processor options that can handle modest/large
loads *MUCH* better for the buck.


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