Matt,
On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 11:08:04AM +0000, Matt Aylward wrote:
> Greetings all,
> I am preparing to buy or build a new computer and would like some advice.
> The basic question is: Which would give me more grunt per $, a dual celeron 500
> or an AMD Athlon 600 single processor. I have a budget of approx Aus$3000,
> remembering costs are higher in Aus than in the US and here in Western
> Australia some of the cutting edge hardware is very hard to get, Perth is the
> most isolated major city on earth (3000km from the nearest other major city),
> so freight charges can be high. I am a fairly seasoned Linux user (3+yrs), but
> have no experience with SMP having never had a multi-processor box. 99.9% of my
> time is spent in Linux
First, a simple word on the technology:
- Celerons are roughly equivalent to Pentium IIs, except that they have a smaller
L2 cache. Not a huge deal, but with large repetitive tasked programs (like
MS Office) this can be a direct performance problem. Otherwise, they are
roughly similar.
- Athalons, however are Pentium *III* equivalent. Actually, they are much better.
Even faster than the new flip-chips. That's because the Athalons are just
silicon brutes--sheer horse power. They also have a much faster and larger
FPU construction--for the first time, Intel is not the best FPU chip.
- Celerons use standard SMP. Athalons use Alpha technology (i.e. the Digital
Alpha chip). The Alpha technology is much, much better than intel's. Dedicated
bus, better throughput, better implementation, etc, etc.
So, put a Celeron up against an Athalon, and an Athalon will literally crush it.
In an indeal world, put an Athalon SMP system against a Celeron SMP, and it would
pulverize it.
But that would be an ideal world. Athalon boards are more expensive, and I imagine
an SMP board would be more so. Also, I have no idea if the linux kernel supports
Athalon SMP protocols (remember, it uses Alpha SMP for actually intel-like processors).
So that would be something for someone else to chime in on.
> My primary uses for this box will be:
> 1. GIS and satellite image processing and analysis.
> 2. Biological modelling using Objective-C and the Swarm Simulation System
> (see: http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/)
> 3. General programming in C and Objective-C
>
> I understand that Objective-C can make use of 2 processors, and the Swarm
> developers are aiming for major SMP and Beowulf cluster support in the future.
Either chip would be up to these uses--I don't see any L2 intensive tasks nor any
FPU stuff.
> Secondary use:
> My 13 yr old son playing Windows games.
Here is where an Athalon would just rock. Athalons are still beating the latest Intel
coppermine
and flip chips in Quake3 bench tests. Yes, the chip is just that good. Again,
the FPU engine on these chips is simply awesome.
You do know that Windows 98 does not take advantage of SMP--you would have to have
Windows NT
to get any benefit. And that has all sorts of headaches in and of itself (sound is a
REAL pain).
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated
If (big if) the SMP was supported, and you could get an Athalon system for
around $200-$300 more than an equally equipped Celeron system, I'd get the Athalon
in a heartbeat. Athalon is better than PIII's and Celeron is roughly equivalent to
PII's. It's a pretty simple choice.
But cost is probably going to kill you. Add to that very few Athalon SMP machines.
You
would be a trailblazer. There are pros and cons to that :-)
Personal note: I have a dual 366 Celeron system with the Celerons overclocked to 511.
I love the machine. Works great, and it is really powerful (I can crunch a lot of
keys for distributed.net). I chose to go with cheaper processors and dump my money
into
RAM--at the time RAM prices where still very low. More horsepower means more stuff
means
more memory. So I would recommend lots (I have 512, which is kind of overkill, but
lots of
fun). However, my current savings plan is for my upgrade next fall to dual Athalons
:-)
That is, unless Linux supports 4 processors well and they start making 4 processor
motherboards for Celerons by then ;-)
Matt
--
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Matt Luker "Now, with God's help,
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Norwood, MA -- Soren Kierkegaard
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