Quoting Yedidyah Bar-David, from the post of Sat, 13 Nov: > > Three months ago I changed my dual-P2/350 to an Athlon K7/900. > > apperently this was a bad move since I can see absolutely no improvement > > in speed (probably since I cut the L2 cache in half). > > That's weird. I have a feeling I read exactly this expectation from > you some time ago (a quick google search ... Aha: > <http://www.mail-archive.com/iglu.org.il-linux-il@iglu.org.il/msg00416.html>
Well, At the time I had less cash floating around to do this switch and decided to postpone this a bit, and do an empirical test with a K7 board I had available. the test showed my original guess was correct then :) L2 cache amount counts more than megahertz. > Although I must say "no improvement" is a bit weird. Do you mean "in > general, day-to-day, non-timed work", or in specific CPU-intensive > things you do? The first. This machine is my mail server at home, Web browser, mutt, CD burner and in the rare occasion also an MP3 player. I am thinking the extra CPU muscle will allow for smoother Firefox experiance, DVD playing and hopefully mastering the translation of old videotapes, 8mm and Super8 projector films to the realm of the DVD or at least DIVX, and just maybe other DVR features as well. > Contrary to Itanium, K8 runs 32bit code very fast. I am not even sure > that "normal" (with normal being quite hard to define) apps will run > faster as 64bit. As was shown in some article, some will surely run > *slower*. In short, the main use is if you need more than 4GB RAM. > Otherwise simply use 32bit versions and wait for things to mature. > Good luck, and tell us about your experience, I think that is indeed what I will do... wait for things to mature then, and not change the kernel too fast (or not much more than the kernel anyway). My main complaints today are rather silly and probably have to do more with bus speed and bad mozilla optimizations. I must admit that at work I had a dual-boot windows+debian on the same T23 laptop and with all the MS annoyances, sailing the web on same-version firefox, is MUCH smoother and more stable in winXP than in Debian Sid (remember, same hardware as well). on to my next project now... figure out why kernel 2.6.9 killed cdrecord and how to fix it. sayonara for now. Shabat Shalom, Ira. -- All-American hero Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
