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Subject: Re: A long time ago, in a CCC far far, away ... There were *HARDWARE WARS*

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 07:22:07 05/28/02

Go up one level in this thread


On May 28, 2002 at 10:05:33, Slater Wold wrote:

Slater i agree with you that the Asus motherboards are great
motherboards. All kind of features etcetera.

However if i compare my asus dual P2/P3 motherboard with a stupid
incompatible dual supermicro motherboard which has a stupid bios,
then the supermicro P2/P3 motherboard provides up to 20% faster memory
access tan the dual P2/P3 asus motherboard did.

Note that duals are slower than the fastest single anyway.

In case of testing a program single cpu, the dual machines are
a very bad testing environment, because they do all kind of stuff
to prevent parallel problems. This means in general that testing
a program single cpu at a dual system is not a good idea, especially
with K7 parallel chipset, which is known slow.

On the other hand, a friend of mine, Ron Langeveld, he has a single
cpu mainboard with 2-2-2 muskin ram and a 1.73Ghz K7, and it kicks
the hell out of the tests you show, even with the same executable!

Regrettably some programs which hardly get profiled, like crafty,
they depend a lot upon memory speed.

At bob's quad which are only 700Mhz processors and where memory
goes in PARALLEL, this is simply no problem. Bob doesn't have a K7,
and doesn't like AMD much, otherwise i'm sure he would have bought
a dual K7 already some time ago and would have found the bottleneck
soon.

133Mhz FSB is simply dead slow and a deliberate marketing choice
from AMD in order to let their new cpu's look even faster.

I read now that the hammer is going to be 30% faster with memory
latency, that's going to kick butt of course for crafty.

Direct 10% speedup for free, which currently means a lot for
specbenches.

Apart from that we'll see i guess at the end of the year a new
release from visual c++ which will hopefully perform up to 50%
better for AMD processors when talking about speed.

For diep, the FSB speed is not such a major issue as i get less
nodes a second. So in short for every million cpu instructions which
diep executes, it is doing MORE with the processor than other
programs. Crafty needs way more memory lookups in the same million
cpu instructions.

That means bigger dependancy upon the FSB speed.

You can blame bob for this, you can blame AMD for having a small FSB,
which logically means that streaming data is always faster on intel
(like 3d video rendering, of course AFTER installing a decent
graphics card with the latest drivers)

Personally i care not so much for this difference in busspeed, but
it is obviously a 'we can produce it cheaper now and look even
faster next time we release a cpu' decision from AMD.

Fact that at specint2000 the extra 256KB L2 cache of the newer northwood
is pretty important for many programs, that tells more about programs
being too much dependant upon main memory, than it says something about
the P4.

>On May 28, 2002 at 08:26:16, Aaron Gordon wrote:
>
>>Slate. I was only 'hostile' due to poor testing methods. When you start
>>comparing things that aren't comparable (for example, P4-SSE2 FPU vs AthlonXP
>>straight fpu, no SSE/3DNow) then you are providing deceiving results. Would it
>>be fair for me to compare a K6-2/300MHz's FPU using 3DNow! to a Pentium3 500 w/o
>>SSE? For you.. maybe. I would never do such a thing however. It misleads people
>>who don't know any better and is downright bad testing. The same goes for
>>Quake3. You and I both know a Tbird 800MHz on a good board providing proper
>>memory bandwidth can get more fps than 139. The same thing goes for
>>encoding/decoding. Without a good motherboard the CPU or anything else can't do
>>much good unless the benchmark/test is 100% cpu biased. Encoding/decoding gets a
>>nice boost from faster memory. Whats bad about it is the 'good' boards I am
>>talking about are only $80-100. Why not grab one and retest? I can call you and
>>tell how what to setup in the bios, which via 4in1's to use, which detonator
>>drivers to use & etc. Then you will see a monster come alive..
>
>#1.) I am using the best dual board out there.  The Asus AMD Dual board.  There
>is NOT a better motherboard (for duals).  Period.  (In the BIOS, I have the
>ability to disable 1 CPU, which I did for these tests.)
>
>#2.) I am using some of the best memory money can buy.  Samsung PC2100
>registered sticks.
>
>#3.) I was using ALL the updated drivers for EVERYTHING.  From the chipset to
>the damn USB driver.  I spent almost 3 hours alone downloading all the newest
>drivers for both computers.
>
>#4.) The BIOS settings on the AMD are just as you have described.
>
>
>The settings in this test were PERFECT Aaron.  I am not asking you to believe
>me, but I am telling you, IT IS SO.  I made sure MYSELF.
>
>Go to Tom's Hardware, or Anand, and compare my Sandra results to theirs for an
>AMD 1.73Ghz.  Mine are actually faster.  Come on man, I am not an idiot.  These
>systems were setup fine.  The 139 fps for the AMD surprised me too, it's a shame
>the GF4 wouldn't work in the P4, I get a 2x+ result with it using the AMD.  But
>XP didn't want anything to do with it, so I was forced to use the GF1.



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