From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 19 8:16: 4 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dualcpus.com (dualcpus.com [65.160.20.195]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1E62237B424 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 08:16:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jgowdy@home.com) Received: (qmail 42524 invoked from network); 19 Apr 2001 15:15:57 -0000 Received: from sherline.cts.com (HELO server2) (204.216.163.132) by dualcpus.com with SMTP; 19 Apr 2001 15:15:57 -0000 Message-ID: <001b01c0c8e3$a65f78e0$015778d8@sherline.net> From: "Jeremiah Gowdy" To: "Vincent Poy" , "Charles Burns" Cc: , , , , References: Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 08:16:00 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > > Thanks for the insight but what about in a Single CPU environment? > > > > This depends on what you plan to do. The general consensus among the > > hardware reviewers is that the Athlon is overall faster than any other x86 > > compatible CPU. > > Yep, that's what I read as well but are there any drawbacks to > being faster such as compatibilty and all that stuff? > The compatibility and all that stuff days of the K5 and K6 are long gone. Today, generally, if a cpu is x86 compatible, that's that. There are no compatibility issues with the Athlon. > > The only significant performance advantage that the Pentium 3 has over the > > Athlon is that its l2 cache memory is _much_ faster than that of the Athlon. Could you explain this ? If you're comparing Thunderbirds to Coppermines, I didn't think that was the case. > > The Athlon has a superior floating point unit that is, in addition, more > > deeply pipelined. When using software that isn't optimized for any > > particular FPU, the Athlon is typically just under 30% faster. (Some > > examples of this can be seen on comparisons between the two at Anandtech) > > Yeah, that's what I am concerned about. It seems that most things > are optimized for the Intel CPU's. While the FPU is faster on the Athlon > than the Intel, what about the non-FPU area? In business applications benchmarks the Athlon always stomps the P3. > > The Athlon can take more advantage of higher memory bandwidth than the P3 > > (but probably not the P4), thus you can get a greater performance benefit in > > some cases using DDR RAM. > > Speaking about DDR RAM, what kind of performance hits would there > be using DDR versus non-DDR RAM? If I remember correctly, depending on the type the best SDRAM gets about 800 megs/sec. DDR SDRAM comes in two flavors, 1.6 gigs/sec and 2.1gigs/sec. > > The Athlon is much, much cheaper. Motherboards, however, are more expensive. > > The overall cost ends up lower with the Athlon, especially if you are > > considering the price/perormance ratio. > > Yeah, that's what I realized as well. It seems like the VIA and > AMD chipset based motherboards costs a lot more than the Intel variants. You can get an Athlon motherboard for $100. Even if the Intel motherboard was half that, at $50, the difference in the prices of the cpus is FAR more than $50. Up to $200 in the higher end processors. People always speak of the higher cost of Athlon motherboards but I don't see the point if the AMD cpu is 40% cheaper and the difference in motherboard prices is relatively pennies when you're speaking of a multi-hundred dollar purchase. > Thanks, I'm familiar with all of those. I guess I just wanted to > know how they do under FreeBSD since all the sites really benchmark it > under Windows. It's the same. If the code is written and compiled properly, the difference should be seen in all OSes. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message