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Re: [SLE] AMD Athlon 1.4GHz DDR vs. P4/P III


From the orifinal author, this matter seems to be getting a bit old by now.

original message:

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).

I believe that the problems this person has been experiencing with Athlons
were not general. Maybe due to hardware problems: Athlon should have
a 250W-300W power supply but the vendor was selling them with a
200W power supply. This could have effected the persormance if for
instance the processor heat up and cut the clock speed in half etc...
He also tried to build a Beowulf cluster (44 nodes) out of Athlon and
that did not work and he had to switch to P III :- ( . Maybe the Beowulf
software did not support Athlons.


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

I've got a 1.4Ghz Athlon (just in) which is about 1.5 times faster than a
1Ghz PIII (with our own software (seismic data processing).

I have confirmed from the maker of the software in question (paup*) that
AMD Athlons are about equally fast or faster than P4 on this program as well.
There aren't official benchmarks on this however. So Athlon seems to be
a very good alternative for scientific computing. Hopefully they get the
Beofulfs also working for Athlon.

P4 vs. PPC:

PPC speed: The bench mark results. The run represents a typical, although a
bit shorter than usual run on the PAUP* software. The software has been
originally made for MACs and the code has been optimized for G4 Altevac
(alt). The difference btw P4 1.7 MHz (and presumably AMD 1.4 GHz) is
quite clear and also Alpha 21264 performs worse. The optimazation for G4
code can be seen when comparing the port (portable eg the same code as in
P4 Linux PH 7.2) run under OS X and alt (Altevac) run under OS 9.x: 11 hrs
vs. 8.8 hrs. Or if the Apple native code was run under G4 800: approx. 9.5
hrs vs 8.8 hrs. P4 vs. G4 PPC runnning the same code: 11 hrs vs 5.5 hrs.
An exactly 2x difference. There seems to be an almost linear relationship to
the clock speed, although this does seem quite strange. The benchmark
was made by the people who developed the software and optimized it for G4.

G4 with lots of L1 and L2 cache is probably great for graphics applications.


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.

Where did you read this ?
The latest benchmarks in the C'T show that the G4 (esp. with code optimised
for the G4) is about as fast and sometimes faster than a P4 ...(P4/1.7)


Benchmark (time in hrs.): this has not been officially published yet ...
Source: Jim Wilgenbusch <paup-support@xxxxxxxxxxxx>. List truncated.

Result CPU type # Speed RAM PAUP System OS

4.9 Intel P4 1 1.7GHz 512 4.0b8 Dell 8100 Windows Win NTsp6
5.0 Intel P4 1 1.7GHz 512 4.0b8 Dell 8100 Windows Win 2000
5.5 Intel P4 1 1.7GHz 512 4.0b8 Dell 8100 Linux RH 7.2
5.8 Intel P4 1 1.7GHz 512 4.0b8 Dell 8100 Windows Win ME
5.9 Intel P4 1 1.7GHz 512 4.0b8 Dell 8100 Windows Win 98se
7.7 Alpha 21264 2 666MHz 512 4.0b4a Microway Linux version 2.2.16smp
8.8 PowerPC G4 2 800MHZ 512 4.0b8(Alt)Apple Tower Mac OS 9.2.1
8.9 PowerPC G4 2 800MHZ 512 4.0b8(Alt)Apple Tower Mac OS 10.01 (Clas 9.1)
10.0 Alpha 21264 1 500MHz ? 4.0b4a Compaq XP1000 Tru64 UNIX version 5
10.4 PowerPC G4 1 733MHz 512 4.0b8 Apple tower Mac OS 9.2
11.0 PowerPC G4 2 800MHz 512 4.0b8(port) Apple tower Mac OX 10.0.4
11.1 Alpha 21264 1 466MHz 128 4.0b4a Compaq DS10 Linux version 2.2.14
11.9 Intel PIII 1 733MHz 256 4.0b4a Dell GX200 Windows 2000sp5



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