> I am mulling over my next machine. I would like to know the performance > difference between using dual Zeons vs two boxes both running P4 CPUs. I > believe that the Zeon only has a 400 MHz bus while the current P4s have a > 533 MHz bus. I would be running XP in either case.
the newest xeons have 533Mhz bus, which is supported by chipsets like the E7501. I started running 4 instances of mprime on a pair of dual 2.8Ghz Xeons, but had to wipe them a few days later and forgot to save the work-in-progress... Monday I'll restart them and note how fast 1 and 2 instances run with and without hyperthreading enabled. IIRC, they thought they'd finish 18,xxx,xxx exponents in 10 days. Note re: the memory contention issue, the dual xeon chipsets like the e7501 have higher memory bandwidth as they use interleaved DDR (2 banks), this may at least partially shift the performance vis-a-vis two seperate p4 systems. OTOH, dual xeon e7501 systems are not cheap. The ones I built for work were $3300 each with dual 2.8Ghz and 2GB ram, but without hard drives, these are 2U rackmount servers using Intel's SE7501WV2 motherboard and a Intel SE2300 rack chassis. They are also *extremely* noisy (seems to be a feature of all dual xeon 2U rack servers as they need massive cooling for the CPUs and 6 hotswap SCSI drives). -jrp _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
