Re: CCL:Athlon vs Intel performance

For what it's worth:
 We've run one single direct speed comparison (I wouldn't call it a benchmark) so
 far, running the same Titan calculation on both a 600 MHz Pentium III
 (non-Coppermine) and an 800 MHz AMD K7 (Athlon) system, both running under
 Windows 98.  (The job was a single point energy calculation at the LMP2/6-31G**
 level for a nucleoside analog.)
 Time for completion (as per program output, but in agreement with wall time):
 600 MHz Pentium III  -  7:05 h
 800 MHz Athlon       -  2:25 h
 Correcting (linearly) for the difference in clock rate, the Athlon is still
 faster (for this job!) by a factor of 2.2.
 Specs:
 600 MHz Pentium III  -  100 MHz FSB, 512 MB PC100 RAM, 27 GB ATA/66 7,200rpm HD
 800 MHz Athlon       -  100 MHz FSB, 256 MB PC100 RAM, 27 GB ATA/66 7,200rpm HD
 However, we've had quite a few stability problems with the Athlon system so far
 (both in Titan and in general), but we think these are more likely related to
 hardware driver problems in Windows 98 than to true hardware instability. All in
 all, YMMV.
 Marc
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  Marc C. Nicklaus                        National Institutes of Health
  E-mail: mn1.,at,.helix.nih.gov               Bldg 37, Rm 5B29
  Phone:  (301) 402-3111                  37 Convent Dr, MSC 4255
  Fax:    (301) 402-2275                  BETHESDA, MD 20892-4255    USA
       http://rex.nci.nih.gov/RESEARCH/basic/medchem/mcnbio.htm
     Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry, National Cancer Institute
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