> Would be interesting to see if there is any performance improvement with
> business applications or web server or mail server or DB processing ....
business applications i couldn't tell you.. though i imagine a spreadsheet
would sing. improvements in standard server applications would be
unlikely. databases might see some improvement, but it's hard to say.
most of the improvements in the x86 line, since the days of the 386, have
been focused largely on improving floating point and raster processing.
games like Quake require obscene quanities of math, because you have to
apply roughly the same series of spatial calculations on a 3D model in
order to determine the color value of each pixel on the screen. to do
that kind of number crunching, you need things like DSPs, which are
basically several thousand pocket calculators all wired together to form a
matrix. you program a pattern of logic into one, then pour numbers into
one side and pull answers out the other just about as fast as you can pour.
programs like webservers and mailservers don't use any of that hardware..
what kind of floating-point calculation would you perform to locate a file?
programs of that nature tend to boil down to simple integer math with
occasional conditional logic. most of those operations are supported by
what amounts to the RISC subset of the total command set. databases also
stick pretty much to integer logic, but they also use a whole bunch of
conditional logic, and improvements in the pipelining of conditionals are
still a hot topic.
for most basic server applications, you'll get just as much value out of a
decent RISC chip as you will out of the heaviest Pentium you can buy. the
design goal of RISC processors is to handle a small command set with
blinding efficiency. the design goal of CISC processors is to cram as
many types of processing power into the package as possible. the two
goals live at opposite extremes of what's sometimes called the "breathing
cycle" of processor evolution.
the basic cycle is that you start with a chip that does a few things well,
then try to support new features your customers are tired of having to
program for themselves.. in the old days it was floating-point
calculations, and now it's stuff like MP3 conversions and 3D texture
mapping.
the two places you can put hardware to support that kind of logic are on
the chip, or on the motherboard. usually, new features start on the
board. eventually, though, their designs become stable enough that the
deay of haing to pump bits across the copper traces between the chips
becomes unacceptably large.. data transfer rates across the motherboard
being 1/20th to 1/100th of what they are inside the CPU.
at that point, the logic of the external chip is moved into the die of the
CPU. the processing for that particular style of calculation improves
enormously, but the overall performance of the chip takes a bit of a hit
because of the additional complexity in its design. over time, more and
more specialty chips get incorporated into the CPU, until some breakthrough
happens in the bus architecture for motherboards. at that point, the
speed of two independent, specialized chips overcomes that of a monomithic
swiss-army CPU, and special features start migrating their way back out to
the board again.
as i said above, the x86 series of processors haven't really done anything
interesting with their basic logic since the 386. instead, they've been
shoveling as much additonal hardware into the package as they can.. the 486
was just two 386es in the same package, with one of them acting as the FPU
(and in the 486SX, one of *those* was disabled.. it wasn't known as the
486-sux for nothing). the most interesting innovations have been in the
ways Intel has turned the package itself into a small, very high-speed
motherboard all its own. what you find under the cover of any recent
Pentium is not a single chip, but a small industrial park of specialty
chips connected by a hodgepodge of ultra-fast buses.
if you want things like high speed realtime 3D rendering, or high quality
digital audio and video, that kind of architecture has a lot to offer. if
you want something more prosaic, like a file server, it's just so much
wasted metal.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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