Hardware/CPU Thoughts (Was: Re: system usage stats )

On Thu, 4 May 2000, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

> > > A Celeron is basically a PII with 128k of full-speed cache. NOT a
> > > server processor, I know but sadly I can't do much about it at this
> > > point.. It's my understanding that "we" want to wait for an AMD board
> > > that has a 64-bit PCI slot because "we" don't like the i840 chipset
> > > for some reason "we" can't understand.
> > Can someone out there that understands CPUs help me out here? My
> > understanding is that Intel vs AMD has benefits depending on
> > use. Unfortunately, I don't recall how it goes ... as a server, Intel is
> > faster, and for graphics processing, AMD is ... or something like that?
>
> >From what I've read, the extra cache in the PII/III gives you a 5%
> boost over the Celeron (I'll guess more for some server apps). Intel
> still sells the Xeon chips, which have a cache twice as big as the
> PII/III, but I'm not sure the clock has kept pace and it was always
> overpriced wrt performance.
>
> I don't remember which way the Intel/AMD thing goes, but most folks
> won't notice a 5% difference in speed.
>
> Not that anyone asked, but imho the best price/performance x86 machine
> has always been a dual processor box one or two clock jumps behind the
> fastest available. You get ~80% more performance for ~5% more cost
> than a uniprocessor at the fastest speed. I haven't looked recently to
> see if there are now uniprocessor machines at the low end that can
> beat the price/performance of the dual-processor setup.

this is the sort of thing I've been moving towards as well ... went a
little cheaper this last time with upgrading my home machine and have a
Dual-Celeron ... quite happy with her so far ...