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Re: good bang for buck machines?

I am using this processor upgrade. I think it added at least a year to
my machine's life http://www.powerleap.com/PL-ProII/. I am pretty
happy with the speed but I had 192M memory to start with.

brucehoult@pobox.com (Bruce Hoult) wrote:

>Hi fellow Dylan hackers,
>
>I'm looking at replacing my trusty Pentium Pro 200 linux machine with
>something a bit more modern.  It still goes pretty well, but finding 72
>pin ECC RAM these days is an expensive pain, it's got a proprietry
>motherboard design so I can't just swap that out etc etc (a lesson I've
>learned for my 2nd x86 purchase).  And now that Apple doesn't use SCSI
>drives any more their price has headed for the stratosphere relative to
>IDE which makes having an all-SCSI machine a dubious proposition when
>you've got enough RAM that you don't do any real disk I/O anyway...
>
>The prime performance driver for the new machine -- the only thing I'm
>likely to do with it that will be slower than instantaneous -- is doing
>program builds and the slowest of those are working on/with d2c.  So I'm
>really interested to hear from people with experience with current model
>x86 chips.  In particular, I'm interested to hear of any significant
>difference between PIII and Athlon performance on Dylan code.
>
>At the moment I'm leaning towards the 700 MHz Athlon on an Abit KA7 board
>with 192 MB of PC133 RAM and some humungous IDE drive.  The
>Windows-oriented sites say that this is "da bomb" compared to earlier Asus
>K7M or FIC SD11 boards that were apparently "da bomb" six months ago (and
>can be found cheap now).  The PC133 in particular apparently really
>helps.  When you compare a system based on this stuff with an
>as-cheap-as-you-can-get Celeron or K6 system it's basically $250 - $300
>more on a total system cost of $1000, but a lot faster.
>
>One problem I'm having is finding realistic performance comparisions
>between current systems and ones that are a couple of years old.  You can
>find all the comparisons you want between the K7 and the PIII, with
>nicely-exaggerated graphs with a non-zero baseline, but how do they
>*really* compare to a P166 or PPro200 or even a PII/300?  And I don't mean
>on Winstone.
>
>
>So, if anyone out there is using d2c on a PIII or Athlon then I'd be
>really really interested in hearing from you about what your machine
>configuration is and how long it takes for, say, a "cd src/d2c;make
>clean;time make" and/or the same thing in the src directory itself (which
>runs all the tests, builds mindy and the demos etc).
>
>Thanks!
>
>-- Bruce
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