SI
SI
discoversearch

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 : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (54650)4/27/1998 11:32:00 PM
From: rudedog  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 186894
 
Maybe a little OT*OT...
NT is a virtual memory OS, Win95 is not. Win95 swaps out whole process contexts if it needs memory. We have done extensive testing showing not much benefit to more than 64MB on Win95 - it's hard to get enough happening to use more than that, the OS will usually hang up from some other problem before bottlenecking on memory.

NT on the other hand always operates out of virtual memory. It can take a 4K chunk from anything in 'real' memory and does so in background all the time if the free memory drops below a preset level, the default is 4MB. This is not really swapping but is page faulting, the fewer page faults the better for performance. It is very easy on NT to monitor the page fault rate and see if you need more RAM.
So large complex applications with large data contexts will just run better and better with more memory, since the memory manager will be above the threshold and will not 'clean up' least recently used pages of real memory. With the kind of things I do (building and debugging applications) the page fault rate can start to run up with 128MB, I use 256 MB and that keeps the rate pretty low. BTW all this on a CPQ 6000 professional workstation with 2 way 200MHZ PPRO which I like pretty well.
You are 100% on the impact of disk, but don't ignore the controller. A fast SCSI with a good controller is the key to great performance IMO.



To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (54650)4/28/1998 1:45:00 PM
From: Tony Viola  Respond to of 186894
 
Michael, Re: "As far as I am aware, the only announcement came from AMD, indicating that
SOMEBODY at HP is going to use the K6."

Oh, swell, AMD is announcing other company's new products again. BTW, what with AMD's yield (hence, reliability) problems, I would hope that a company with an excellent reputation for quality and reliability, like HP, would run in horror from a company like AMD. OK, here comes the AMD crowd, saying the yield problems are over. Well, prove it.

Tony



To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (54650)4/28/1998 4:24:00 PM
From: Ali Chen  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 186894
 
Michael, I appreciate politeness of your response
to my biting remarks about 128MB/swapping. Of course,
you are correct about workstations with 256MB of
memory. However, you seem to pervert the point of
original poster:
Message 4191394
where the whole talk was about sub-$1000 computers.
People typically do not use NT4 in this market
segment. People do not use 10,000rpm drives in this
segment either (and never will).

P.S. With 64MB of memory and Windows95, the use
of swap file across Winstone98 benchmark (including
Excel/Word and Corel/WordPerf "task switching")
is 1.2MB only, with just few hundreds of page faults.
(due to some accounting perhaps).