Subject: Re: CCL:G:LoBoS, a Beowulf cluster at NIH

From: [email-masked] (Xinjun Hou)
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 12:18:51 -0800

On Mon, 24 Nov 1997, Chris Harwell wrote:
>...
>3. Don't be taken in by the Intel Bunny people and automatically buy a
>PentiumII.  The PentiumII is a PentiumPro with MMX (useless for
>floating point ops) and faster memory access.  Unfortunately, the
>advantages are offset by an off-chip cache that runs at half the speed
>of the PentiumPro.  Our benchmarks showed that the PentiumII performance
>improvements barely scale up with the faster clock rates.

Another issue is the cost of processor in the future: PPro's architecture
(on-chip cache) makes it very costly in production. This is another reason
Intel came up with PentiumII with off-chip cache. The off-chip cache structure
is also cheaper to expand, both in terms of size and clock speed.

So bottom line is that PPro with on-chip cache has a better architecture
than Pentium II for computional extensive work, but Intel might not lower
the price further or devepop it more (high clock speed or more cache).  The
cost/performance ration of two CPU would change in the future.

Xinjun

C     Xinjun J. Hou ([email-masked])      Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
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