Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jcholewa who wrote (6263)	8/23/2000 12:14:11 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 275872

JC, a 1ghz Athlon (or PIII for that matter) is going to be faster than 2 PIII 500s, in anything cpu bound. Assuming the processing power scales with mhz, which it mostly does. There's a queuing theory proof, though Scumbria disagrees:). There may be other reasons for getting the dual system, in terms of future upgrades or other capabilities, but on pure compute power, that particular dual config doesn't look like the price/performance choice. Of course, since you say "dual capable", all you're looking at is a single P3 500, which is a wimpy low end machine these days, but no doubt more than adequate for a Netware server. Cheers, Dan.

To: jcholewa who wrote (6263)	8/24/2000 2:37:59 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

JC, Re: dual Piii-500 and Novell I am not sure about the latest versions of Novell, but Novell has a history of very poor scaling on multiprocessor machines. The parts of their Netware code were basically single processor. Also, I am not sure if you have any applications running ON the server that need CPU time. Not many people do. Netware is mostly dedicated to being a file / print server. In this configuration, you are I/O limited, and for the little processing that's going on, a 1 GHz processor will perform better than 2 dual processors. It is extremely unlikely that the short bursts of activity that the server receives will be able to be assign perfectly to 2 processors. Even in the unlikely scenario that Netware is perfectly multithreaded, there will be some bottleneck, some waiting of processor 1 to finish the work on processor 2, but with 1 processor double speed, the single CPU is 100% utilized during the burst of activity and will most likely finish before the 2 half speed processors. Scumbria's argument is that 2 processors have 2 sets of L2 caches (resulting in twice the total of L2), which will help overall memory latency. Also, if the software you are running is multithreaded, there is less of the swapping the multiple threads in and out of memory on 2 CPUs compared to 1. I think Scumbria's arguments are valid, but they depend of on the software being perfectly multithreaded, without dependencies in the threads, and on the task at hand being able to be split into 2 threads that will execute in paralell. I write software for living, and I can tell you that in application programming this is just not the case. I guess you want to upgrade to get better performance. I think in servers, memory / disk I/o are more important that CPU alone. So the only reason I see going with dual Piii is the feature of some Xeon based system to accept more than 4 DIMMs. Piii 500 has 100 MHz FSB and PC-100 memory. You would get better performance from PC-133 memory, especially in servers, where memory bandwidth is very important. But the bad thing about PC-133 is that you can have only 3 DIMMs. I think the fastest performance for the least amount of money is to make your own server based on 1 GHz Athlons with up to 3 PC-133 CAS-2 modules (they go up to 256 MB each) = 768 MB. I just assembled 2 of those earlier this weak, and they ar very similar to Anand's, with a difference that mine have Abit KT7-RAID (RAID used for mirroring) and my rack case has dual hot-swappable power supply) The total cost of each one is about $3,100. Joe