Shane Miller wrote:
>
> hi:
>
> i am getting a SMP linux RH5.2 system. i initially was seeking
> a dual pentiumII ASUS board in the 233Mhz-266Mhz range with 128MB.
> i thought i should get these PIIs with 512KB L2 cache. and then
> three quickie questions presented themselves:
>
> 1. according to a techie at a store i visited, a dual pentium 90
> is plenty fast. he said there's no need to go up to PIIs and
> his dual P90 out performed a faster dual PII mother board running
> NT. this was a networking box. i will be writing CAD/CAM software.
> i think this guy could be right for network bound apps but that
> for CAD/CAM PIIs would be appropriate. would you concur?
Well, do not believe this techie, do a simple calculation: A P90 has
90 Mhz, a P-II400 has 400Mhz 400/90=4.44 - so you have a speed
increase of a factor 4 - Ok, i know, this is just the processor speed
but including the fact that the P90 has no MMX, no onboard cache
(what is important for SMP systems), no 100Mhz front side bus etc you
will achieve a speed increase of at least 5 compared with a
dual P90.
Once again, the fact that the P90 has no second level cache on chip
makes this processor perform bad in SMP systems. I run at home a
dual P200 system and a dual P-II 233 system. When I compile my
linux kernel with "-j2" I get a speed increase of around 90-95% on
my P-II but only around 50-70% on my P200.
On the other hand I have to state that in some _rare_ cases a small
on chip second level cache can also be an advantage but this will
not apply to most applications.
> 2. since the FAQ says ASUS SMP boards have (almost) no known problems,
> i checked out their website. problem is all dual (or quad) MBs
> are discontinued. so were can i get one?
Get the ASUS P2B-DS, you can probably still get these boards, most
people seem to be content with it (I also have one). The other way
is to buy a Gigabyte board, the quality is not as good as the Asus
boards but they are cheaper (At least here in Austria - half price).
> 3. if i get a quad-processor MB do i need to put a CPU into each
> socket to run linux? i mean, if i'm cheap i might only put 1 or 2
> CPUs right off the start.
If you want a quad system, you will need PII/PIII Xeons, the normal
PII�s/PIII�s are only for dual systems. The Xeons are quite expensive.
Moreover you will need a MB, these are also quite expensive.
I would only recommend you a dual/quad System for a Non-Microsoft OS
(like Linux).
Win95/98 makes no use of the second processor and WinNT can only use 2
processors,
if you need a quad system, you have to buy a NT-special edition
(expensive).
Moreover (at least with my dual P200) I could not experience any
performance
increase when plugging in the second processor. Linux is great but NT is
still
_very_ slow. The only thing that changed is that NT crashes very often
or the network hangs - so it seems that NT-SMP is very unstable, service
packs
make no difference. I do not use any special applications, only the MS
Visual
C-Compiler 5.0 - when compiling/debugging or simply typing text into the
editor blue screens or hangs do happen very often. Moreover - what is
really
catastrophic is that there seems to be no option like "make -j2" with
the
MS-VC compiler, so there is absolutely no speed increase when compiling
an
application.
Conclusion: If you want a Linux/NT/95 dual boot system I would recommend
you to buy a simple single processor solution.
Regards,
Hermann
--
Hermann Himmelbauer
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Addr. : A-3400 Klosterneuburg, Martinstr. 18/2 Austria (Europe)
Tel. : ++43-2243-26562, ++43-2243-22305-24, Fax: ++43-2243-22305-27
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