Subject: Athlon vs. Intel
From: Peter Q. Olsson (olsson@koyukuk.at.uaa.alaska.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 11 2002 - 15:16:17 AKDT
Hello All-
Recently there was a discussion thread on athlon vs. Intel. Here is an
interesting comparison.
I have a new SMP box, Tyan T-bird mboard w/ 2 Athlon processors clocked at 1600
Mhz, 2 Gb of memory and a somewhat older SMP box w/ SuperMicro mboard and 2
PIIIs clocked at 800 Mhz w 1 Gb memory.
I have run a very CPU/floating-point intensive weather forecasting model on both
boxen. The execution time on the PIII box was 2.5 times that of the Athlon, even
though the clock speed is only different by a factor of 2.The app was using only
1 of the processors on either machine, leaving the other to do everything else a
linux box does. The fcst model used about 200 Mb of memory, so the memory
difference was not a real factor.
The Athlon box also seemed to put out a fair amount more heat while thinking
hard. I have been told that Athlons are measurably faster for floating point ops
(assuming no other bottlenecks in the system) and this kind of supports that
contention, though the Mboard differences canbe a factor here too.
I also paid about $1000 more for the PIII box than the Athlon. Ain't technology
evolution a grand thing for the end use
PQO
__________________________________________________________________
| |
| Dr. Peter Q. Olsson, |
| Chief Scientist, Alaska Experimental Forecast Facility |
| University of Alaska Anchorage |
| 2811 Merrill Field Drive |
| Anchorage, AK 99501 |
| voice: (907) 264-7449 |
| fax : (907) 264-7444 |
| olsson@aeff.at.uaa.alaska.edu |
|__________________________________________________________________|
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Thu Jul 11 2002 - 15:17:54 AKDT