Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3242 mails)

[Pekka Kohonen <pekka.kohonen@xxxxxx>]

Dear All,

I am planning to use my linux system for molocular evolution 
simulations that require a lot of calculations, typically taking up 
to a week on a fast P III machine (program Paup*).  By all accounts 
the AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz is faster than P4 1.5 GHz 512 MB without DDR 
RAM and maybe about equally fast as P4 1.7 GHz with an equal amount 
of RAMBUS RAM or at least DDR RAM.  But the 1.7GHz is a lot more 
expensive.  However a I talked to a person who claimed that on his 
set up a P III with 1 GHz beat Athlon in Linux in an application that 
required a lot of RAM and calculations (he had 750 MB).

1.) Can anybody confirm this from their own experience?

2.) How is this with the P4 1.5 GHz machine.  The reason according to 
this person is that memory intensive programs would not benefit from 
the larger L1 and L2 cache memory of AMD Athlon.  The lack of 
appropriate cache has been attributed to the lack of performance as 
experienced by P4 processors.

3.) How well does Suse Linux 7.2 support P4 processors.

P.S. This could be the reason why MAC G4 800 was left standing in the 
dirt by  P4 1.7 GHz, even thought the code was optimized for G4 and 
not for P4.




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Pekka Kohonen
Turku Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences
Department of Medical Microbiology
University of Turku
Kiinamyllynkatu 13
FIN-20520 Turku
Finland
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