From owner-freebsd-alpha Wed May 15 18:45:20 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from aromo.spock.cl (aromo.spock.cl [200.27.125.98]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6300F37B407 for ; Wed, 15 May 2002 18:45:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from aromo.spock.cl (aromo.spock.cl [200.27.125.98]) by aromo.spock.cl (8.11.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id g4G1jLA29147; Wed, 15 May 2002 21:45:21 -0400 (CLT) Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 21:45:21 -0400 (CLT) From: Roberto de Iriarte To: Diego Montalvo Cc: alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Alpha CPU Performance vs i386 In-Reply-To: <20020515225520.79881.qmail@web13408.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, 15 May 2002, Diego Montalvo wrote: > > Howdy, > If I am running a database intensive program such as mysql, on a 500MHZ Alpha, and a 1GHZ PIII, which would preform faster? > Diego > It depends, of course. Quickly browsing the Spec CINT2000 Benckmark suite, i'd say, for most mysql usage, 197.parser and 255.vortex, might give you an idea of relative performance. Note that the system configurations used for this benchmarks are highly optimized, but, just for the comparison, let's think that the vendors's optimizations even out each other. (I will use CINT200-BASE numbers) An Intel PIII 1.0 Ghz Intel VC820 (Rambus Chipset) 133 Mhz FSB 197.parser 340 255.vortex 706 Alphas at 500 Mhz An oldie (AlphaStation 500/500) 21164A 8 Mb cache 197.parser 130 255.vortex 207 Also an oldie (DEC Personal Workstation 500 AU) 21164A 2 Mb cache 197.parser 124 255.vortex 203 Not that old (Dec-98) (AlphaServer DS20 Model 6/500) 21264 4 Mb cache 197.parser 206 255.vortex 400 So, i'd say an Intel PIII would be faster than an Alpha if your database application performance would be CPU bound. That is usually not the case (IBM Mainframes would have been given up a long time ago if it were!), so it would depend on the particular configuration of your systems. A big reason why old Alphas, Sun's, RS/6000's, etc have a long useful life lies in the good design of the IO subsystem and peripherals (Not multia of course :)) For that, you must think, in PC terms, about higher end server class machines that are not that cheap. Regards Roberto BTW, Reading the detailed results of the various SPEC benchmarks is much more usefull than reading the baseline number. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message