> > I'm on a 333Mhz UltraSPARC IIi and I would find it difficult to describe > > it as poor. Clock speed doesn't really mean much in terms of real CPU > > system / performance IMHO. Most of the folks I know turn their noses up > > at it because it's not up to the same clock speed as their Athalon and > > then they wonder when my machine out performs theirs. > I'm on a 333 UIIi too. I use my U10 as my development and multimedia > workstation and, stopwatch at hand, I sadly have to see that my workstation > is slower than my old PC (Athlon based, 2000+ processor), and I'm talking > about real-life tasks (e.g. using the same programs with the same operating > systems), not mere bogoMIPS calculations. What sort of tasks? I can believe heavily FP intensive tasks (like multimedia) are easier on an Athlon (even better on a PPC 9450 Iwould have thought) but I find that the significant cache on the processor I'm using makes a big difference on lots of other stuff. Plus the lower (in terms of clock cycles) latency in memory access seems to make a difference but that is purely an impression I have nothing to back that up with.
> Obviously, system's speed is not related to CPU's clock only (for example, my > CMD646 integrated IDE controller is only capable of multiword DMA versus the > UltraDMA2 capabilities of my old VIA southbridge on the Athlon m/b (using the > same hard disk), and the main memory isn't designed to skyrocket at DDR-like > timings (it was designed years before DDRs, it's understandable). > Just to make it clear: I like my workstation, I bought it with hard earned > money and I'm quite happy about it, just I am less than an enthusiast in the > workstation's performance on the multimedia field (mplayer, as an example, > even with SDL optim. enabled and the like, can't play a simple > dvd/divx/mpeg/you name it at a human-recognizable frame rate. I understand > perfectly that my video card is a 4-Mb model and it was bleeding edge when my > workstation was built, but the processor's aid in getting things solved in > this field is not sufficient, and so I visually feel that the system's > performance is poor. Hmmm... I'm working on some autovectorisation stuff at the moment - this might help this sort of app. Any idea where the bottlenecks on this are / have you odne any code profiling? > Never said the mighty UIIi is poor at all, and excuse me > for the post's length. If you excuse me for being rabidly anti-x86 and completely going off on one. Cheers, - Martin -- Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Seasons change, things come to pass"
