John - It depends on what the machine is optimized for.
If what you are doing is mainly monitoring data, CPU
speed is not the critical element. Are you getting
your data thru a T1 connection over 10/100Mbit ethernet
or are you receiving it over a modem? Are you doing
any statistical number crunching or are you using software
packages to monitor market data updates? Would you
say your applications are more graphically intensive?
I need a little more info to help.
As for the bottlenecks, when Intel ships it BX chipset early
next year, you shouldnt see any bottlenecks except for the
ones imposed by modems, NIC's, old hard drives or
crappy video cards. Host CPU and memory bus will run
at 100Mhz. The cache bus will run at 1/2 the core CPU
frequency for Slot1 PentiumII. For 300Mhz, this will be
150Mhz for cache burst cycles. BX will also support AGP
(Advanced Graphics Port) and will clock data in 2X mode
at twice the 66Mhz bus speed. This will also offload video
data from the PCI bus improving its performance.
Here's a quick high level comparison of a Pentium 200Mhz with FX
chipset vs. the soon to ship PentiumII with BX.
Pent/FX PentiumII/BX
CPU bus 66Mhz 100Mhz
Memory 66Mhz 100Mhz
Video 33Mhz 133Mhz
Cache 66Mhz 150-225Mhz
Also, Ultra DMA will up the Hard drive transfer rate to
33MBytes/sec, double todays current PIO 4 standard.
Furthermore, SDRAM at 100Mhz today may soon be transitioning
to 200Mhz bridging the gap ro RAMBUS. The SDRAM clock will
still be at 100Mhz however, data will be sampled on both the
rising and falling edges of the clock, much like AGP.
These performance enhancements are not trivial. Current
benchmarks are not capable of exploiting the true capabilities
of these machines.
MEATHEAD |
