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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spots who wrote (349)	3/8/1998 5:34:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Upgrading....more PII forum responses... Spots, the auxiliary sound page is a little light, we could use a few posts:) home.att.net (the author does not consider that the PII 333 runs cooler, one might think it is a factor in a dual CPU system especially with SCSI harddrives) From "PDI" Subject Upgrading to a Pentium II? newsgroups.intel.com Excellent Advice! Let me go you one further, Until such time as Intel gets back into the innovation game and gets away from their current "sleight of hand" and band-aids, forget processor speeds above the 300MHz realm. In the world of the typical user, the processor, Cache, RAM, Disk Drives, and video are the performance critical items. When comparing processor performance between a 200MHZ processor and a 300MHZ processor, we have a 50 percent increase in processor speed. But what we have really accomplished is to make the processor to spend 50 percent more cycles waiting for Cache at 150MHZ, RAM at 66MHZ, video at 33MHZ for PCI and 66MHZ for AGP, and disk drive at somewhere below 33MHZ. Without going into the complicated mathematics, and looking at a simplified equation, if we are real lucky, we may see as much as 20 percent (The processor is only 1 of the 5 critical sub-systems that affect performance) of that 50 percent increase in processor speed or 10%. Real world measurements typically put a system such as this in the 5 to 8 percent improvement range. As processor speed increase beyond the 300MHZ range, that actual real world benefits will continue to decline. Even the 100MHZ bus will only improve performance for the RAM segment (on an Intel based system) by 50 percent while the other four segments remain the same. The percentage difference between a 300MHZ and a 200MHZ processor is 50 percent. Between a 400MHZ and a 300MHZ processor this percentage is only 33 percent improvement. Based upon the above assumptions this ends up being a real world improvement of 2 to 5 percent at best. As processor speeds increase, Intel is capitalizing on the processor clock speed as the primary selling point for their big buck prices. But, in reality, they are actually giving you less and less performance improvements with each step, and they are increasing the steps significantly. One final point in closing, you commented on the 350/400/450 processors being the shortest lived processors in the Intel stable. According to Intel's current Processor roadmap, they are discontinuing the P2-233/266/300/333 shortly after the 350/400 is released. Won't this make the 300 and 333 pentium IIs the shortest lived processors?