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

From: John McKelvey <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 20:06:02 +0000

Comment:

While the price of the more expensive 200Mhz PPRO chip may not get a lot cheaper,
I would note that the price of the (only) 10% slower 180Mhz/256Kcache chip is
available for ~40% of that of its faster brother/sister.  They can be had for as
little as $175.

John

Xinjun Hou wrote:

> 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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