Bob Proulx put forth on 1/12/2011 2:48 PM: > That makes a lot of sense to me. And also when cpu time divides by > 1/N where N is the number of processes then if you have more convert > processes running then effectively that task will get more total time > than will the other tasks. A little bit more here and a little bit > less there on the other tasks running. If you had two converts > running and one mail task then the mail task would get 1/3rd and the > two converts would get 2/3rds. As opposed to one convert and one mail > task with 1/2 and 1/2.
The math isn't quite that simple as it's a 2-way SMP box, and Linux can't perfectly schedule compute intensive and non compute intensive processes across CPUs. >> And context switching on a 550 MHz CPU with only 128K L2 cache is >> going to be expensive when two compute intensive tasks are running. > > I commend you on keeping that machine running. My main mail and web > server was, until the motherboard died very recently, a 400 MHz P2. I > was sad to see it go since it had been such a good performer for so > many years. I'll be _very_ sad when this one dies. The Abit BP6 is the only dual Celeron motherboard ever made. It is legendary among over clockers due to the SMP nature, the fact that Celerons were 1/3rd the price of PIIs at the time, and that 333s were easily bumped to 500, and 366s easily bumped to 550--a 50% increase in clock speed, usually achievable with stock heat sinks. No modern chip will do that AFAIK. Thus, you got _more_ performance than an equivalent dual PII workstation which topped out at 450 MHz, for less than 1/3rd the price. This single board prompted Intel to disable the SMP circuitry on all future Celerons. They'd left it enabled assuming no one would actually build such a board. Abit did, and using the venerable Intel 440BX northbridge no less. :) The BP6 also has a lot of features most other boards were lacking at that time (1999), including jumperless BIOS configuration of CPU FSB and multiplier, independent CPU voltage adjustment, a Winbond voltage, thermal, and fan speed monitoring chip, a dual channel 4 port HighPoint UDMA/66 chip yielding a board with 8 HDD capability with 4 at UDMA/66 which no other board offered, and an SMBus header, which _NO_ other consumer board had at that time. The BP6 was the most exotic high end board on the market for at least a couple of years. It used a low end chip, but was faster than anything else at the time. Too bad Abit is no more: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1051283/the-abit-obit -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4d2ec415.9080...@hardwarefreak.com
