Randall Oshita wrote:
Rod!
Dude the P4s are fast esp. with PC1066, that's 533FSB. Expensive though.
And not supported by Intel.
Bandwidth for video and stuff.
Get RAID too and stripe ur HDs.
Go to like www.anandtech.com to see benchmarks using apps you plan to
use.
Don't think 64bit Hammer gonna help if your software is not 64bit (I
could be mistaken??)
We gotta go ride!
Thanks.
Randall
Ah this is the beauty of opensource software. Even before the code gets
rewritten, the compiler already supports x86-64, so a simple recompile
can get some of the more obvious (to the compiler at least) optimizations.
Even without x86-64 optimizations, the hammers run old 32bit code
blindingly fast (I believe I saw a 700MHz developer sample clawhammer
beating a P4 1.4GHz, but of course this is an informal devel test). I
was mostly referring to the future capabilities though.
As for RAID stuff, remember you don't need a special RAID controller to
do RAID. In fact, the promise and highpoint controllers are just
UDMA/133 controllers with special firmware to make them LOOK like they
do raid in hardware (they really do it in software, hence why special
drivers are needed in linux to do raid, separate from single disk).
This is especialy evident because the promise UDMA/66 addon controller
(and I assume the recent ones as the design is still the same) could be
modified using a few wires and a resistor to do raid.
Anyway, don't bother with a dedicated controller unless you're getting a
really expensive one (unlikely). Software raid's cpu usage may be
higher, but it's often actually faster these days because of the
extremely overpowered CPU in your system.
Regarding P4s, they're fast with Rambus, but as you point out, Rambus is
REALLY expensive. Currently sitting at $56 vs. $77 for 256MB PC2100 DDR
vs. standard (whatever that is) rambus. Rambus also gets expensive
quicker as speeds go up as it's getting less popular. See Warren's post
to this regard and also the deceptive business practices that coined the
term "pulling a rambus" (recently applied to Forgent over the JPEG
patent nonsense).
Unfortunately, the P4 was designed for rambus. It expects high
bandwidth and can tolerate the latency that you get with rambus. It
chokes when you start putting the slower DDR on it. Athlons use DDR
effectively because they expect very low latency on their memory bus.
Put rambus on an Athlon and it would choke, that's why you haven't seen
Athlon boards using rambus (also why no one's made a suitable north bridge).
--MonMotha
