Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 08:16:00 -0700 From: "Jeremiah Gowdy" <jgowdy@home.com> To: "Vincent Poy" <vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET>, "Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com> Cc: <lplist@closedsrc.org>, <kris@obsecurity.org>, <mwlist@lanfear.com>, <freebsd@sysmach.com?>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD Message-ID: <001b01c0c8e3$a65f78e0$015778d8@sherline.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.31.0104181957520.4840-100000@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET>
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> > > 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
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