Author: Robert Henry Durrett
Date: 18:43:40 05/28/02
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On May 28, 2002 at 09:06:36, K. Burcham wrote: > > > > >In absolute terms, the 8-way Pentium 3 Xeon systems are only 44% faster than the >4-way ones, which means that with the 4 extra CPUs, the system only gets 1.76 >CPUs worth of extra performance, which is poor value for money. This level of >scalability is not that surprising since each group of 4 CPUs share 0.8GByte/s >of memory bandwidth. As a side note, it seems likely though that 252.eon fits >almost perfectly into the 2MByte cache the Pentium 3 Xeons have as it gets >nearly linear scalability - the higher the cache hit rate, the less main memory >is needed, which leaves more for the other CPUs. > >Even worse, in some tests, the 8-way system actually does worse than the 4-way >system, and this could possibly be due to differences in the chipsets or because >the extra contention itself on the shared Pentium system bus causes efficiency >to drop. It's unlikely that the compilers/OS would have made much difference as >for each CPU type the tests were done at similar times with the same compilers. > > >http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000338 > >kburcham The Xeon processors are currently interesting because they are available and because 4-way and 8-way systems using Xeon are either here on on the near horizon. Also, perhaps interesting because Xeon is getting faster soon. But what about the other Intel and AMD processor types? They, too, will be seen in the near term [1 or 2 years] with 4-way and 8-way systems and the processors are expected to be much faster than they are today. They may be able to do more "work" in the same amount of time than Xeon. Maybe it's because the chess world is not ready for anything other than 32-bit? Bob D.
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