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Subject: Re: 2 CPU's vs. one fast one

Author: Gregor Overney

Date: 01:06:26 11/21/00

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On November 19, 2000 at 18:19:34, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On November 19, 2000 at 10:07:17, Randy Schmidt wrote:
>
>>Of course Bob's comments are interesting...
>>
>>Yesterday I put together (in web browser only) a dream system
>>from Dell.  It had two 1-gig P3's and 1024 of RAM...total cost
>>around $6500.  Now according to what I am reading, it would be
>>better to spend around $3500 and wait until the 1.6 gigs are
>>released?  I can save $3000, wait 3 months and I have about
>>the same speed of machine?
>
>basically, yes.  Of course if you do any computation at all, and you do
>multiple things, the second cpu will work quite well.  The 1.7X figure I
>quoted was for my chess engine using 2 cpus.  2 compiles will run 2x
>faster, for example.

Interesting. After the P4/1.5G got announced I made a "paper-based" comparison
of a dual P3/1G with Dell's new 330 Workstation. The numbers are:

P4/1.5G SpecINT2000 535 (one CPU)
P3/1.0G SpecINT2000 418 (per CPU)

(SpecINT2000 includes Crafty in its benchmark.)

Those values are obtained using SIMD and SIMD 2. A feature that is not yet
supported by VC++ 6SP4. Let us take Bob's suggested value of 1.7 for Crafty then
the dual P3/1.0G offers a value of 710 (a p6/200 gets a value of 75). Since my
old p6/200 calculates 100,000 nodes/sec, I expect a dual P3/1.0G to achive
around 900,000 nodes/sec when using Crafty. Right? A dual P4/1.5G should be the
first _dual_ CPU-based Intel system that reaches more than one mega-nodes when
running Crafty.

But if you can wait a couple of months, just buy a dual P4/1.5G or, maybe, a
dual Itenium/1.5GHz........if you can wait, you'll probably never buy a system,
because at the same time Dell ships your system, it's already outperformed by
the next one in line.


Gregor




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