At 07:22 PM 1/5/99 -0500, Andrew Isaacson wrote:
>
>Quick summary is that I don't see any reason at all to buy a regular
>Pentium II, unless you're absolutely CPU-bound (and in that case, what
>are you doing on x86?). The Celeron's price/performance at 333 and
>400 MHz just blows the PII out of the water.
But Prime95 (or variants) is not typical in that it stresses CPU and L2
cache performance. It isn't clear to me how the trade-off between the
Celeron 333A with its 128K L2 running at CPU speed compares to the PII-333
with the 512K L2 running at 1/2 the CPU speed when doing LL tests on
exponents in the 6000000+ range. If Prime95 can shuffle info into and out
of the 512K L2 of the PII but can't fit it all into the 128K L2 of the
Celeron, and consequently has to read and write frequently to the slower
SDRAM with the Celeron, then couldn't the PII be significantly faster for
Prime95? I think real world tests are needed to determine the outcome. Of
course, my understanding of how Prime95 operates is rudimentary and what I
said above might be hogwash.
Kel
