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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (44025)	12/25/1998 9:28:00 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572896

Re: "Nobody argues that there is no gain from faster L2 whatsoever. The argument is whether it is economically reasonable." Ali, you're losing it. You have already argued twice today that the performance gain is next to nothing, and once that it is dramatic. Switch to the plain EggNog. Re: "Even if the two models were identical (and they WERE NOT because of different CHIPSET)" The 440BX and 440GX differ only in that the 440GX offers 2Gig addressability vrs 1Gig for the 440BX. That's 1 address line Ali. No other difference. EP

To: Ali Chen who wrote (44025)	12/26/1998 2:11:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572896

All, Xeon advantages are faked out: Recently "Tenchusatu" posted an "analysis" of ZD bencmarks for "identically" configured computers from Gateway, G6-450 (PeeII) and GX450-XL (Xeon): Message 6920852 where he noticed that the Xeon Winstone99 performance was 7% better than the "equivalent" P-II. Upon this observation Tenchasatu started to promote a theory of significant superiority of full-speed Xeon caches vs. P-II. Message 6973712 However, a little more careful inspection of benchmark data reveals that the P-II-based machine was crippled in hard disk part. To see this you need to look at corresponding Winbench99 from the same publication: ftp://ftp.zdnet.com/pcmag/1998/1215/labsdata/m22p1b1b.xls zdnet.com Just look at three models: Dell XPS R450 (PeeII), and the two from GTW, and compare their Disk Winmarks: Model CPU Drive Disk Winmark ----------------------------------------------- Dell XPS R450 P-II IBM DTTA-371010 3570 GTW G6-450 P-II IBM DTTA-371440 2460 GTW GX450-XL Xeon IBM DTTA-371440 3660 ----------------------------------------------- All three models are using the same line of IBM hard drives, so the disk performance by definition should not differ too much. And it is easy to see: the Dell with P-II delivers the same disk score as the super-Xeon model from GTW. However, for some "reason", the GTW P-II model, with the same drive, appears to be 33% slower! Now it is easy to find the true reason as why the normally configured Xeon model posted 7% better scores than the same but misconfigured P-II counterpart, with crippled disk subsystem. Since the disk time in Winstone99 constitutes at least 30% of all run time, it is quite possible that the properly configured GTW G6-450 could post even better scores than the Xeon system! In conclusion, the application performance advantage of Xeon is highly overstated. Have a nice whatever, Mr. Tenchusatu and Mr Phud altogether.

To: Ali Chen who wrote (44025)	12/26/1998 5:23:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572896

<Even if both of them had 128MB memory, it is highly likely that the more expensive system was equipped with Cas-2 memory instead of Cas-3.> More babble. <Even if the two models were identical (and they WERE NOT because of different CHIPSET) the 7% gain is not a good justification of the doubled Xeon price> You're just too predictable, Ali. Somehow I knew that you were going to retreat back to the old "It isn't worth the hefty price premium" argument. But just to be fair, I do agree that for desktop systems, Xeon's price premium really isn't worth it. Tenchusatsu