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Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 09:12:06 +0300 (EEST)
From: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>
To: Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu>
cc: Brian Tao <taob@nbc.netcom.ca>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Pentium II-266Mhz
In-Reply-To: <19970526010046.05547@crh.cl.msu.edu>
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On Mon, 26 May 1997, Charles Henrich wrote:

> On the subject of Re: Pentium II-266Mhz, Brian Tao stated:
> 
[snip]

> >     I presume the first involves the CPU going to main memory, while the
> >     second fits entirely in L2 cache?  What's the bandwidth over a PCI bus?
> >     132MB/sec?  It looks like the CPU can push almost twice that.  Time for
> >     a 100-MHz bus or a separate CPU-to-RAM bus...  
> 
> Yep, thats been my gripe for a long time.  The PCI bus sucks, it needs to be
> twice the bandwidth of the CPU (or more!) for growth, and memory access times
> need to go down.  I would bet if someone did a formal study, that a huge
> percentage of Intel cycles are spent waiting for loads..  Speed up the
> Pentium(Pro/PII) without changing a thing, except the motherboad!

PCI doesn't suck. These are the chipset makers who do. Just get a
motherboard with 64-bit PCI backbone (that is, the 32 bit slots are behind
64/32 bit bridges) provides twice the bandwidth. 

As for memory, it is also your problem that you don't have a
motherboard with memory controller clocked at xxxMhz with a wider datapath
than 64 bits. 

And the ability to have real big real fast caches.

Complain to the chipset makers.

Before everyone starts shouting at me - the problem in the PC world is
that even if you have the money, you currently can't get what you need.

	Sander

PS. Port FreeBSD to PowerPC and buy RS/6000 servers from IBM. Some of
these do have 100Mhz/166Mhz and wide bus with 604e (which has about the
same performance as PPro 200 at 200Mhz/50Mhz bus). The cost? Well who's
talking about that.

> 
> -Crh
> 
>        Charles Henrich     Michigan State University     henrich@msu.edu
> 
>                          http://pilot.msu.edu/~henrich
>