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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: richard surckla who wrote (36811)	1/30/2000 4:13:00 AM
From: Alex Fleming	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Richard, Here is my interpretation of the info you received. 1) new P3-733EB($1300) with i820($300) and 128MB RDRAM($1600) for about $3,200 2) a pair of P3-667EB ($1900) on a dual-cpu UW-SCSI board ($540) with 256MB PC133 ($650)for about $3,100 Issue No. 1 To have a pair of P3-667EBs working with SDram implies the following. - that the bus is running at 133mhz which is not supported by Intels BX/GX chipset. 100mhz is the rated speed so 650s or 700s but not 666 or 733. 1) Provide URLs or other sources of verifiable origin, which shows that an x86 Computer system with a single Pentium III CPU using 128MB RDRAM is faster than an equivalently priced dual Pentium III system using 256MB PC133 SDRAM. Issue 2 This is easy. Having a second CPU implies that you are running NT with multithreaded applications. There are not that many of these. His example of Autocad as a valid application should be another warning. It is not multithreaded and does not care if another CPU is present so the 733 with Rambus will always be faster. Photoshop is also a poor example since only a small percentage of the application is multithreaded...advantage single 733+rambus. In the best cases dual CPUS will show about 1.8x- this is with NT. The additional overhead in allocating threads often results in a single CPU machine being faster on single threaded applications than a dual.(Though not by much) Since the majority of applications we run are still single threaded the faster CPU with rambus will almost always show better performance. It is incredibly common for people to think that because NT supports multiple CPUS that they will have twice the performance. This could not be further from the truth. NT does nothing except partition threads and execute them on separate CPUS. If the application was not written to support multithreading, NT can do nothing to help. There are advantages to being able to run multiple applications and have multiple CPUS so multitasking is the primary benefit not absolute performance. When NT is running a multithreaded app, the dual setup should have the advantage but applications that utilize multiple CPUS are so few and far between that general statements on performance cannot be made. My overall impression is that this person does not know what he is talking about. Alex

To: richard surckla who wrote (36811)	1/30/2000 6:04:00 AM
From: Alex Fleming	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Richard- As far as test data on the web with reference to dual processor performance, the most commonly used application is 3D Studio Max from Autodesk, the makers of Autocad. The reason is that it is one of the few applications that supports dual processors well. Perhaps you could checkout their site. They have had good technical documentation on this in the past. My company is in the architecture/3D Viz business and we are big users of Max and almost all of Autodesks products. Even though all our machines are multiprocessor boxes, our most computationally expensive application is single threaded and therefore does not run any better on a dual CPU machine. We use this software to do accurate lighting simulations within 3D models with very large datasets. It can take several days of computation to reach a solution. It is here that memory bandwidth of the 840s with Rambus makes a big difference- more than the change in clock speed would suggest. There is lot of data out there to support that this guy is blowing smoke. The only situation where he has a point is if he is using an application like 3D Studio Max and where the extra memory and CPU can work together. One or two applications where there is an advantage cannot be used to conclude that this advantage available under all circumstances. Alex