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