Re: [OFF-TOPIC] Pentium II performance?
On 16-Feb-1998, Marcelo E. Magallon <mmagallo@efis.ucr.ac.cr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know this is off topic, but I don't have access to cola (and
> newsgroups in general) and I feel more confortable asking here, because I
> want Linux specific answers.
>
> Ten days ago a professor here bought a Pentium II/233 system. He
> promptly installed Debian on it, and let me use it for my (thesis) work.
> First thing I did was to benchmark the thing using a program of my own.
> This program says a Pentium MMX/166 (my old pc) gives about 24 Mflop/s. A
> Pentium/100 is about 16 Mflop/s. If the numbers are accurate or not, is
> not in dispute now. What's important is the relative speed, and I find the
> numbers quoted to be reasonable. (For those curious, it's 3 sums, 3
> multiplications, 1 division)
>
> The PII says 39 Mflop/s. Over the weekend, I bargained a PMMX/233, which
> says 33 Mflops/s. I don't find this this reasonable at all! Taking as a
> reference the performance leap from a 486DX4 -> Pentium (same clock speed)
> I was kinda hoping something near 80 Mflop/s for the PII (yes, I know,
> it's silly to take that as a reference, but one can only hope)
>
> I know I'm not playing fair comparing the systems this way (different
> kernels, memory, chipset, ...) but I was hoping somebody could give better
> statistics on this.
Try http://infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC
Look in the "CPU and System Performance Info" section.
According to SPEC-95 int fp results,
a PII-233 9.5 (Integer) and 6.4 (FP)
a P-233MMX 7.1 and 5.2
a PPro-200 8.7 and 6.8
a PII-333 12.8 and 9.1
Intel's x86 chips aren't really very good. Probably the 66Mhz bus
doesn't help things much. x86 is all done on marketing, not on
performance. x86 performance doesn't scale very well with Mhz.
The new breed of P2s (higher bus speed) might improve this performance
somewhat.
Look at Alphas:
a 300Mhz 21164 8.5 and 12.7 (this shipped in 1994!)
a 500Mhz 21164 15.0 and 20.4
The 21264 (600Mhz? 700Mhz?) is expected to ship soon, and has an estimated
rating of 44 and 66!
Of course, there are only SPEC results -- all benchmarks are inaccurate,
etc, etc. Run your application to find out how fast your application
goes. Divide each benchmark by the cost of the chip and motherboard
to really compare (particularly for compute farms). But I think
you'll find the P2 is just overpriced. A K6 is a much better purchase
if x86 compat. is important.
>
> I'd really appreciate if somebody can help me on this one. We are planing
> to build a Debian-based compute farm, and the cost difference between
> PII's and plain Pentium's could translate into a big difference in the
> number of hosts installed.
>
> Side note: K5/133 = 9; K6/200 = 31; 486/66 = 4; RISC 9000 = 18; VAX
> 3000... oops, forgot about it, but it was surprisingly low.
Plain pentiums or (maybe better) K6s are probably a better bang for
buck, particularly if they are headless.
One of the best courses I did at university was a computer architecture
course that had a lot of emphasis on performance measurement.
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