Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 11:10:19 06/14/00
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On June 14, 2000 at 07:00:00, Gordon Rattray wrote: >On June 13, 2000 at 18:54:04, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>Oops, forgot to answer the question about the Athlon vs. Pentium (III). >> >>On most benchmarks, the PIII seems to do _marginally_ better than an Athlon of >>the same clock speed. >> >>If I was in the market, I'd buy an Athlon, though, because they're usually much >>cheaper and easier to obtain. >> >>-Tom > >Is there anything else that needs to be considered when buying a system with one >of these processors? For example, do you know if FSB (front side bus) speed has >any significant affect? I've noticed some systems with 100Mhz SDRAM and others >with 133Mhz. Any idea if this matters for chess programs? I believe the only reason [most] chess programs go to main memory is to mess with the hash table. Since this "only" happens several thousand times/second, I doubt FSB has any effect on chess program performance. There are some programs where the working set overruns typical L2 cache sizes. HIARCS, for example, seems to be huge and may be affected. The Athlon is frequently advertised as having a 200MHz FSB. Notice that the memory in Athlon systems is only 100 or 133MHz, so don't be fooled into thinking that you're getting something extra with the 200MHz bus. BTW, avoid RDRAM because it's expensive and stupid. :) -Tom
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