[conspire] Re: Last Year's Supercomputer

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Edmund J. Biow (biow at bigfoot.com):

> I'm a cheap SOB, as witnessed by my recent prestigious award on
> this forum.

Feels good to be a certified Cheap Bastard[tm], doesn't it?

> All these artificial benchmarks really don't tally well with
> real-world performance, I'm afraid.  According to the benches I've
> seen the latest "800 MHz" Intel dual memory channel PIV motherboard
> chipsets (Canterwood, Granite Bay, Springdale) own the Socket A
> competition in terms of memory performance (see
> http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000278), but when you
> actually compare system performance, the difference just doesn't seem
> very important.  For instance, one site compared the latest & greatest
> hyperthreaded PIV 3.06 GHz in a  i875P/ "Canterwood" chipset board
> with dual DDR 400 running at 400 MHz to your new board with a Barton
> 3200 & the same memory, but running at 333 FSB.  The result?  The AMD
> rig is better at AutoCAD, while the Intel set up bested it in 7 out of
> 10 games.  http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000284 Also see:
> http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd/hardware-reviews/1249_1.html

Both Microsoft OS-based -- and I'll bet that the benchmarks, if they're
like just about all the other ones I've seen, involved singletasking
single-user operation.  This is why I say that benchmarking is one of my
favourite (even if somewhat outre) forms of fiction.

The results might extrapolate somewhat to Linux _if_ your primary
interest is gaming, and it seems that this actually is what that lot
really _are_ obsessing over.

I do love Super Socket 7 rigs, even though they're a bit antique, these
days.  My K6/233 is good enough for any functionality I care about,
especially given that it's optimised for heavily loaded I/O (unlike
typical Windows-gamer-slanted systems).  If I were building a new system
today, I'd obviously not choose the same components, but I'd certainly
tune its strengths similarly:  fast RAM access, decent but not
supercharged CPU, decent 2D-accelerated video using hardware that has
excellent XFree86 support, and a kick-ass disk array.  Or I might
satisfy myself with just getting a faster K6 CPU replacement, since
they're still around.

> One benchmark that is most reflective of what most non-gamers actually 
> do with their computers is the SYSmark Office Productivity 2002 (which 
> uses a bunch of real world MS Office applications, browsers, Winzip, 
> McAfee AV, Netscape 6, voice recognition, etc.)

Well, that might reflect what singletasking, single-user Win32
non-gamers actually do with their computers.

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                                     Age, baro, fac ut gaudeam.
rick at linuxmafia.com