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Dual Athlon Preview: Linux Kernel Compile Smokes
Mr. Flibble writes: "The fellows over at NewsForge have an article describing how they were able to test the 'World's First Dual DDR Athlon' running Mandrake 7.2 on a prerelease motherboard and chipset. The surprising thing is that the dual system was 142% faster in a kernel compile than a single processor system!" Jeff (of NewsForge) says this is the genuine truth. Now if only the right motherboards would start showing up in quantity on pricewatch ...
Ah, yes... I can see it now.
Marketing Bozo: "Ok folks, here's the "before" version. Wow, thats mighty slow! Lets Ctrl-C out of that kernel build, drop in that second Athlon, and build that kernel again!"
A few minutes of fiddling pass
Crowd: (ooooh---ahhh!)
Marketing Bozo: "Ok! Off we go! Wow, look at that sucker haul! Its nearly 150% faster than the single processor version!"
Crowd: (ooooooh!---ahhh!) (clap clap clap)
A voice from the back of the crowd speaks...
Bowie: Hey dickweed! You forgot to MAKE CLEAN!
A fight breaks out..
Crowd: "Kill him!! KILL HIM! He runs that PROPAGANDA page! His words and ideas bring fear, destruction and DEATH to all who listen!! KILL HIM!!"
The sounds of the beating continue as Marketing Bozo takes pre-orders for his motherboard..
Just another day in at the convention..
Umm...I wish, but I dont think so. The biggest "get SMP into the hands of the masses"-style event I can think of was when people realized they could put celeron's into special SMP-enabling slockets,
and put them in (relatively) cheap SMP motherboards.
This Tyan board isnt ATX form factor (look at it, it's *HUGE*), and it has 64 bit PCI slots. Somehow, I doubt it'll be a cheap board either. I'll bet it'll MSRP at over $500 for just the mobo.
Besides, Intel doesnt seem committed to SMP as they once were. They've stratified their CPU lines, and now they make a lot of Celerons and P-III's (some models) that physically cannot do SMP. It used to be (well 2-3 years ago) that _every_ Intel CPU could do SMP, but it isnt so anymore.
FWIW, all Athlons can do SMP, but there's no boards on the market that support it, and even when this one makes it to market, it'll probably cost a mint and require a special case/PS.
But we also have a passive heatsink that IS rated at 1.2 GHz, and you can have a special fan that blows through from the side.
So there definitely are ways to fit it into 1U. Of course, whether my boss decides to use this motherboard in 1U systems or not is up to him.
More than likely, it's a Ultra160 SCSI. There are two channels on this motherboard. Don't remember whether it uses Symbios or Adaptec, though.
I ran that silly test on my dual P3 500 MHz w/256 MB RAM with the 2.4.1 kernel (sorry didn't want to download 2.4.0ac12) and this is what I got:
3m50.767s
Compared to a 2m compile on the dual Athlon 1.2GHz w/256 MB RAM. That doesn't make the dual Athlon look very good, IMHO.
I just unpacked a fresh kernel tree, then:
make config (used defaults)
time make -j3 bzImage
Anyone else have any results to share??
--
b1v1r
I.e. if I'm running at half the speed you are, does it make me faster than you by 50%? Maybe not.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Slot Athlons are obsolete. They were the first incarnation of Athlons and don't have on-die cache (it's on the CPU card, a la P2/early P3). AMD has switched to socket Athlons long ago. The on-die cache (a la latest P3/P4) gives significant speed improvements.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Not always. Just for grins, I compiled 2.2.18 on a uniprocessor system (AMD K6-2 333MHz) running 2.4.1. Based on repeated tests with one and two processes, I consistently find that giving make -j2 actually increased my compile time. It wasn't much (real elapsed time went from about 6:04 to 6:08, with virtually all of the increase coming in userland time), but enough to convince me that on my home workstation, I'm sticking with the compilation by one process. Unlike some of the other results here, I'm still running on ext2 filesystems, so I didn't gain any performance benefits from ReiserFS. Maybe next week...
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
This building houses 50 companies each having 40 employees and only one entrance?"
:-)
...the bus architecture supports some sort of switching (like a crossbar or twin-split).
:-(
LOL! And they run in and work for five minutes and then run back out? (That would complete the analogy.
Well, the EV6 bus that the Athlon uses is a point-to-point link (hence, technically, not a bus...), so it is indeed compatible with a crossbar. I remember at least one company that was going to make crossbars for multiple athlons - I can't remember their name - but I do remember them closing down.
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__
Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
I thought I saw Linus quoted on Kernel Threads saying that on SMP systems he uses:
make -j3 'MAKE=make -j3' bzImage
Athlon sucks for kernel compilation time. The Pentium-II sucked worse, but the Pentium-III has a 256-bit path to second level cache, and gcc /loves/ to have about 128kiB to 256kiB of very fast cache.
The Athlons 64-bit path to second level cache cannot compete. It would be nice if AMD optimized their processors for gcc, but honestly I think SpecWeb and Quake are more important benchmarks for them.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
On my dual 933 VP6, I get 1 min, 10 second compiles with:
make "MAKE=make -j3" -j3 bzImage
Be sure you've got plenty of memory (I've got 768M)
Did they try to boot the kernel they compiled? =)
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
I did a similar test using a 466 Dual Celeron system with 128Meg of memory on Red Hat 6.x (With that special Abit board).
:) Additionally it's great for compiling / MP3ing in the background.. Almost zero lag is noticed (not to mention the almost 100% increase in MP3 encoding performance. I believe that was mostly CPU bound.
In order to be scientific, you need a control.. I was sorry to say that this reviewer did no such thing. You point out that the -j helps even for single-CPU's, and this definately was the case with my test results (I can go dig them up if anybody is interested). BUT, there is a limit to the performance enhancement of -jxxx, since a single task running at full throttle is much faster than 2 or 10 tasks switching back and forth. So what I did was for both single and dual CPU modes, I ran with the bare make, then -j 2, then -j 3, -j 4, and finally -j 5 (where performance was being hurt).
I don't recall, but I believe beyond -j 4 I was swapping to disk (though I know I achieved that phenonmena at a sufficiently large number).
Another problem with the experiment was that the slower method was run first.. There is the issue of disk-cashing - namely that the second test stood the chance of having key libraries and possibly most source code still in cache during launch which would dramatically reduce the IO latency. An ideal test of CPU performance would be to put half a gig of memory in there, run it through once, "reboot", then run it for the other.. This is precisely what I did, and I do believe there were several seconds shaved off for cached recompiles.
Personally, I like dual proc's just so I can watch xosview's dual-CPU meters flop back and forth.
-Michael
-Michael
Two threads on one processor:
:) AFAIK make is not multi-threaded. And even though Linux makes little distinction, MT is faster than MP due to a reduced cachable memory foot-print. But most of that is moot since make has extremely little overhead, all the caching gest thrown away due to the fact that make makes hundreds (thousands even) of exec-calls.
.h files (something that at my project at work literally takes 4 hours.. 1 minute for each .cc file (even if it's only a couple lines long)). If someone experienced enough with those libraries wants to work with me, I can handle the perl-xs. :)
You mean two processes (jobs as make calls it).
That reminds me.. When is someone going to add make and gcc libraries to Perl? I want to be able to use Perl as the "process-glue" between all these steps so that building does not require forking / reparsing of all those damn
-Michael
-Michael
Because the test isn't a valid test. They didn't *just* change the CPU configuration when they ran the second test. In fact, they didn't change the configuration at all. They just increased the number of concurrent compiles. Doing this even on a single processor system would have shown an improvement simply because there's IO latency involved in compiles (and lots of it). Running more than one compile at at time allows a second or third compile to use the CPU while the first and/or second are tied up waiting for IO.
The test they ran does not indicate the benefits of dual CPU alone. It shows the benefits of dual CPUs combined with the benefits of running multiple compiles at the same time. That's why you end up with more than 100% increase.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
The disk itself will be doing more caching on the second time through, as will the RAM disk cache, and various other caches (even the caching of gcc itself...) Also, does a `make clean` _really_ clean the tree back to pre-compile stage?
To do this properly would require two separate kernel trees to compile, and a reboot in the middle, and preferably SMP kernel vs non-SMP kernel in the reboot... The other way, which is more practical in the circumstances, could be to try doing a `make -j1; make clean; time make -j1` followed by a `make -j2; make clean; time make -j2`... That would be closer to reality, but still not quite...
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I would expect to see Tyans board sell well. I also strongly suspect that Abit, on the strength of things like the BP6, and KT7 series, combining the likes of the BP6 and KT7 will be a big seller. Well, I hope so at any rate!
:)
I really want a dual Athlon Abit board
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The make -j3 lets make run three processes at once, which would lead to a speedup even on a single processor system, because disk I/O and CPU-bound compilation can overlap.
/. readers typing "make -j3 bzImage".
The noise you hear is the sound of thousands of single-CPU
Im with you on that one, after reading the responses to this article, I realized that some people recompile their kernels WAY too much. I like Linux (and I do my own kernel builds) - but DANG!!! I didn't even know (or care to know) that there were so many switches / options for the friggin kernel build. I feel old....
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
Because two of these can run at the same time (one per CPU), the data doesn't have to be written to the disk between stages.
The data doesn't have to be written do disk anyway -- that the entire point of the -pipe option in gcc. All data is written to stdin of the child processes, resulting in faster compiles because nothing ever hits the disk until to assembler outputs the object file.
Multi-processor builds are faster because make (with the -j option) compiles several files in parallel (idealy, one per processor), not because data is piped from stage to stage in the compiler.
The reason they use make -j3 on a two-processor is to take advantage of the fact that compiling programs is both a compute-bound and I/O-bound operation. While one instance of the compiler is waiting for data to be read, another instance is busy generating code. Both processors are always in use, even when one of the instances of gcc is stalled waiting for an I/O operation to complete.
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
so from what i recall we would do a:
alias make='make -j2'
then you do a make..The reason i believe was that make would then go into each subdir and use the make -j2 command rather than just go serial after the top dir ? Hmmm been some time so i am not completely sure, but thats what i recall..... anyone have more info on that, and should they have done something like that ?
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Why do people consider 142% for two processors impressive?
There is no 'make dep' anywhere in that artice at all he NEVER DID 'make dep'. do a 'find in page'
-- Jason...
The real question is will TYAN see enough of a demand to justify the cost of mass producing these systems or will they just charge $1000 a part. They had dual Athlons since 1999 but manufacturing costs were far too high. Now with embedded systems the rage you'd think they'd never recover the cost of mass producing SMP boards.
Sounds a bit slow to me. What you really want is 20 second kernel compile times :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Is the AMD chipset rambus capable? I could check, but it's not important.. What I'd like to see are similarly configured systems with both Rambus and DDR, to see how well RDRAM handles dual proc heavy loads like compilation. I know that Intel's PIII uses out of order memory pre-fetching to maximize memory requests, and that can quickly saturate the DRAM controller (and memory, which I think can only interleave 2 requests). I'm wondering if latency can be over-come in such memory depedant operations..
This of course requires that enough memory is used to fully cache the disk and alleviate disk-IO latency.
-Michael
-Michael
These results would imply that I/O is a serious bottleneck, so I'm not sure how that squares with the assumption of optimisation being a major cost.
Any thoughts?
Next time I am in the market for a new box, I might buy a dual processor Athlon. :-) I wonder how much the board is going to cost? Watch out Intel here comes AMD....(again!)
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
yup. all this really shows is that new athlons are so fast that compilation is I/O bound.
I wonder how fast one could make a compiler if it were persistent, so that all the common #includes didn't need to be reparsed for every source file.
But I thought the point is not to see the difference between the SMP kernel using one processor and the SMP kernel using two processors, but instead, between a non-SMP kernel using one processor (really, who would use an SMP kernel for 1 processor?), and an SMP kernel with 2 processors. The test is really between SMP and non-SMP.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Sure its not a tri-athlon system?
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
they have run the process with one make on a single CPU setup, and with three parallel makes on dual CPU setup, so the result is unfair to a single CPU setup since while you wait for I/O you don't do anything. Even on a single CPU with multiple MAKEs you'll get better performance. Granted, dual CPU setup is faster, but NOT that much as test has indicated.
A better test would have been to use -j2 for a single CPU. You want something for the processor to do while the disk is spinning. Spawning three processes just increases contention for resources on a single CPU without really buying you anything.
Basically, any supra-linear speedup makes me worry -- I'm willing to believe a bit of superlinearity from preloaded disk caches and what not, but 142% is quite a bit more than I can accept at face value.
Who cares about compiling kernals, Im gonna fly through the distributed.net blocks!
Patrick C. Lamoreux lamoreux@iastate.edu
Now, does Linux's SMP still do silly things with the cache on these chips? I recall that the kernel would entirely disable the cache on both chips (which made pIIIs into Celerons (effectivly)). It's nice to see some alternatives for dual CPU machines though.
That was the point. Otherwise, you're only running 1 thread of the build at a time, and the other processor is sitting on its thumb. I'm surprised at the amount of surprise over the -j3. I've always heard that when you're doing a build on linux, and you don't need the machine for anything else, you do a 'make -jn' where n=num processors+1. Something about the way that the kernel does its scheduling. Irix and solaris don't seem to benefit from the +1. Of course, between hardware and OS differences, it's kinda hard to isolate the variable.
There's a better news bite at Ace's about this. Basically, the second compilation used 3 threads, so the CPU may have had less idle time and i/o bottle neck then the single.
"Unfortunately, the benchmarks vary significantly between the two tests in that the first is completely serialized while the second (dual-processor) test is run with three parallel make processes (notice the -j flag). Because the first system is running with only a single build instance, the processor is spending a great deal of time simply waiting on IO. Meanwhile, the dual-processor test was performed with not just two, but, in fact, three make processes. The difference here is that a processor will not be completely idle while waiting on IO in the second test, as there are two additional build processes running concurrently. This is why the use of the -j parameter is often recommended even for uniprocessor systems, as a parallel make will often yield much higher CPU utilization and thus faster compiles.
"Until then, it is very difficult to make a representative statement about the performance of a dual-processor Athlon system from this benchmark."
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Just for the hell of it, I tried out my own little benchmark.
Single-processors system, compiling linux-2.2.18 w/ ReiserFS patch 3.5.29.
'make clean && make dep && time make bzImage':
real 7m24.803s
user 6m30.070s
sys 0m39.630s
'make clean && make dep && time make -j3 bzImage':
real 7m9.606s
user 6m28.400s
sys 0m38.910s
This is a relatively monolithic kernel; only sound is modular, everything else I need is compiled in. So, doing a 'make -j3' on *my* uniprocessor system yields an absolutely <sarcasm>*MASSIVE*</sarcasm> 15.2 second gain.
In short, while I wouldn't make any bets on the benchmark these fellows did, I don't think they're as useless as most people seem to be thinking.
Barclay family motto:
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Barclay family motto:
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(Either action or death.)
> Actually that chipset supports up to 8 CPUs just by adding an extra northbridge for every extra CPU, above the intitial 2 CPUs.
Uhm, NO, sorry. Wish it were true, though. The 760MP chipset supports up to TWO processors only. You'll see >2 proc support chipet(s) from other vendors, later on.
What about NAT?
--
"Linux Kernel Compile Preview: Dual Athlons Up in Smoke"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hey all,
I realize, and realized when I published the article, that I could not be 100% accurate for a number of reasons. And, I stated many times, that this is preliminary/experimental in every way. This is the results of both prerelease hardware and the fact I could not physically access the box, and had no way of removing or disabling one of the CPUs in order to do accurate testing of the -j switch. I realize that these results, therefore, are not the most accurate, however, I wrote this merely to give people an idea of what Dual Athlon performance would be like. That is why this article is labeled as prerelease, a preview, etc. Trust me, when I get a final release motherboard that supports DP Athlons, I will be doing a full and correct evaluation, but for now I figured that the best thing to do would be to get some results out there, just to give an idea. You can do Single Processor benchmarks of an Athlon on your own, and I would encourage you to do so and post them here.
Thanks for the feedback, 99% of which has been very constructive. I will of course be attempting to get some quality time alone with this thing (*wink wink nudge nudge*), but for now this is the best I was allowed to do. I figured a glimpse would be better than nothing.
Wee,
-Jeff
It seems to be benchmark flavour of last month.
I haven't kept in touch with the MPEG standards, but I assume at least some multi-processor usage is possible.
I don't car how long a kernel compile takes. With a monolithic kernel, you're going to spend most of your time in the link stage (my work project takes about 15 minutes to link (on a huge Sun server), purely because it can only use one of the 4 Ultrasparc chips) and thus isn't a good multi-processor benchmark.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
does this beast require? How about the power supply?
ever since i first saw that pic, i've been wondering something, why the hell is the power connector in the middle of the mobo? :P
-motardo
Since when adding another CPU will do more than 100%? heck, just when I read 142% increase, I was like.. "anybody can make a story print it on a web site, and people will go for it".... man I can't beleive the amount of crap being posted on web sites (and them being actually LINKED to).
I don't want to troll, but this makes no sense, the only way you could do more than 100% increase is if the compiler is optimised for dual processor systems and not for single (which wouldn't make sense at all) OR the guy obviously changed a key/switch in the benchmark tests from a system to another. Which voids the benchmark in the first place.
Linux compile is an okay benchmark, but how about something with less confusion, where you can't play with settings too much and the application is both single and dual CPU capable?
I personnaly use Lightwave3D a lot, so I benchmark using this software, it gives a good idea on a system to system basis and supports up to 8 threads. There are already scenes that are standard on the CD for benchmarking so people can see if their system is better than another or the increase of performance. Yes I know, Lightwave doesn't run on linux, but the point is it's a benchmark that can be run cross platform and people can rely on the numbers, I want a dual Athlon system, everybody wants one or almost, but I don't want "overjoy" to overrate de numbers, we have enough of Intel's marketting dept for that sort of bs.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Yes, you are right. I tried it a few years ago on my P133 system with 32M RAM and the kernel compile time was minimal for make -j4. With both -j3 and -j5 the compile was slower.
-Yenya
--
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
Aahh, the humanity ...
:)
It has no ISA ! Blasphemy ! I bet it doesn't even have ROM BASIC
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Wow, deja vu! I haven't seen reclining SIMM sockets since 286 30-pin SIMM days. (That's about 1991 for all you youngsters.) Anyone remember de-soldering the pins from SIPPs to make SIMMs? Shortly after, AMD released their first truly hot product for the home PC market - the 386DX40.
The positioning of the power socket is really strange - smack in the middle. Notice some other interesting features - on the edge closest to the camera those black trapezoid sockets look like they might be SCSI? And what's the large beige rectangle right next to the Intel logo chip?
I sure hope they get this out soon. I have a dual PIII system right now, and an 800MHz Thunderbird also. The Athlon is as fast as the PIII system for most tasks, except when multitasking - playing MP3s at the same time really slows the single-CPU system, while the dual-PIIIs are barely affected. While SMP systems don't tend to go faster on specific tasks (as the link in the main story would have you believe) the real benefit is that you never have to wait - while something is processing, just start another window and do something else. Hope they include ATA100 raid, like many of the slot-A boards do now.
(Ob-bedroom-hardware-review-site comment: "Obviously this is an extrememly stable board, because there are lots of capacitors and they are big ones.")
This is a relatively monolithic kernel; only sound is modular,
um, what does that have to do with parallelisim? compiling driver xyz as a module doesn't give you a more multithreaded kernel or any other speed advantage. it just means you can add and remove features as needed for a small memory gain. trivial, at today's prices.
--
A.
Ehh.. Shoule have read better. That is very impressive! How can this happen?
This suggests that they made a kernel on the same system before, and try to ``undo'' the make.
This is stupid. Why? Because:
- they did not run a ``make dep''. This means the so-called ``single processor compile'' (which it is not!) is set back several seconds (make dep takes 40 seconds on my SMP Celeron 466).
- The SMP version can take advantage of this, as ``make clean'' does not need ``make dep'' anymore. (AFAIK).
- ``make -j3'' is *not* the same as ``testing an SMP compile''.
If they really wanted a single vs. dual processor kernel compile test, they should have started with two real kernels, one for uniprocessor, one for SMP.Then make a ``test config'' .config-file, for example with ``cp arch/i386/defconfig .config; make oldconfig'' (and press a couple of enters). Copy this file to ``Testconfig'' or something.
Now start the system with the single processor kernel and run the following:
make mrproper; cp Testconfig .config; make oldconfig; make dep; time make -j$N bzImage
Now reboot the system and run the dual processor kernel. Recompile, with -j$N maybe going up to 4 or 5 or so.
Now *that* is something that comes close to a benchmark.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
He makes his point well - the benchmarks probably aren't that bogus. However, they are still bogus to an extent, and thus, well, bogus. :) It would be interesting to see a non-weighted benchmark of this type. This takes away from any actual speed that the dual board config might actually boast. For instance, now 125% increase won't seem quite as impressive as it truely is to most individuals. :)
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Heh you think they would have learned from all the complaints with heatsinks breaking the caps on some socket A mobo's.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Bah, not a problem ! If the beast releases enough heat, I would use it to heat up my dorm room... :)
Does that mean that the compilation was done before it was started?
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
there seems to definately be two different types of pci slots, the bottom one is indeed different than the ones above it. the very top slot is agp.
.brad>
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The extra CPU didn't make a bit of difference. The extra fan just makes more noise.
Im running an Asus P2B-D, also BX, with SB-Live and have no problems in Linux or windows, with 2.2 or 2.4 kernel.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Not that it really matters, but I've gotten a win2k machine (it's been configured for a special task) to boot in just around a minute. 20-30 seconds of which is the motherboard's POST (so damned slow, only bad part) with the other 30-40 being win2k boot time. And that time is from pushing the power button to a full desktop (I configured auto-logon.) Running a 266 mhz p2, 64mb of ram.
I believe I know what your problem is:
Even though Linux has a CLI like DOS did, you are not supposed to just turn your computer off when you are done. You are supposed to shutdown properly, otherwise when you reboot Linux will have to fsck your disks, which can be a time-consuming process.
Take my advice, shutdown properly, it'll increase your Linux boot time 3 fold!
Why do I keep typing pythong?
If you have 2 CPUs, using an odd number of processes makes it much less likely that each process will stick to one CPU. Each time a process migrates to another CPU, it will lose any cache context it build up (since that's stored in the CPU).
You may be thinking that two of the processes stick to one CPU each, and the third bounces back and forth. In fact, it is more likely that all three of them bounce around.
Run -j4 and it's more likely that each processor can settle onto one CPU, where it will make good use of the cache.
On one CPU, -j2 is often helpful, since it can overlap processing with IO. However, some broken makefiles secretly depend on the order in which a non-parallel-make builds things, so such makefiles will not work with -j2.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
FWIW, all Athlons can do SMP, but there's no boards on the market that support it, and even when this one makes it to market, it'll probably cost a mint and require a special case/PS.
I agree on the power supply, Athlons have a big draw, and duals will be worse of course. I disagree on the cost. Remember the BP6 from Abit? It was a big sucess because it took cheaper chips (Celerons) and created SMP systems at at price that was reasonable.
Here we have Athlons, offering a far better price/performance ratio than anything Intel has to offer. If Abit comes out with a board in the BP6 price range, I bet its more popular than the BP6. Remember, the BP6 has its own website few motherboards can claim that.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Linux SMP kernel does the right thing as far as cache synchronization, according to the text Understanding the Linux Kernel published by O'Reilly, in reference to kernel 2.2:
... But now updating becomes more time-consuming: whenever a CPU modifies its hardware cache it must check whether the same data is contained in the other hardware cache and, if so, notify the other CPU to update it with the proper value. This activity is often called cache snooping. Luckily, all this is done at the hardware level and is of no concern to the kernel.
The section "Hardware Cache" in Chapter 2, Memory Addressing, explained that the contents of the hardware cache and the RAM maintain their consistency at the hardware level. The same approach holds in the case of a dual processor.
Hope this helps
Cheers,
Andrew
No real speedup. The best speed on my Compaq 5100 @ 300 with 512 but only one processor inserted is at -j3 (diff between any was less than 15 seconds). The time (for 2.4.0test12, my minimalist config) is:
9m47s real, 9m12s user, 0m44s sys.
Same 5100, second processor in, the time is:
5m19s real, 9m25s user, 0m43s sys.
The result? Only a 82% speed increase. Which should be typical for all Intel based SMP systems (Loss numbers run 12-17% cumulative per additional CPU, depending on mobo.)
Compare that loss figure with, say the AS/400. Quoted loss figure is less than 3% cumulative per CPU.
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3v1l_b0r1s at d4rkr0ck d0t c0 d0t uk
http c0l0n 5l45h 5l45h www d0t d4rkr0ck d0t c0 d0t uk
1/ They did the 'mono' test on a bi processor kernel, paying the SMP tax (a SMP enabled kernel is slower than an non-SMP enabled one)
2/ They used -j 3 for the bi procesor one, while the first one was probably I/O bound.
3/ The did the mono-processor first, than the bi processor. The disk cache may have helped the second compile.
A correct way to test would be:
foreach i (1 2 3 4)
1/ Boot the machine with a mono processor kernel
2/ time make -j $n bzImage ; make clean
Repeat with multi processor kernel.
If one don't want to reboot between each test, than you should do something like:
make -j $n bzImage ; make clean ;
before running the real tests.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Then your linux boxes are probably misconfigured. Are you running lots of services you don't need?
Have you recompiled your kernel to remove checks for hardware you don't have?
Is windows 2000 starting some of its services after the gui appears, just giving the impression it's finished booting, when, in fact, it's still doing stuff in the background (I know NT 4 does that...)
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Is there SMP support in the kernel used for this "test"? You can -j3 and Dual-whatever all you want but the test won't be accurate if the test machine itself isn't running a SMP enabled kernel.
Also more info on the hardware would be nice. For example what is the board layout, are the chip/slot next to each other? What about cooling solution? Two Athlons means 142% more heat perhaps? :-)
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
D*mn, it's a long time 'till christmas!
---
Privacy is terrorism.
What are you running for chrissake? My debian boots way faster then my win2k even though the debian runs on a much older machine.
War is necrophilia.
System: SuSE 7.0, kernel 2.4.1 compiled with Uniprocessor and APIC/IO_APIC.
Athlon 1.1GHz, Asus A7V motherboard. FSB is 100MHz DDR. Memory is 256 megs at PC133, ATA66 5400RPM drive with ReiserFS.
I performed three series of tests. All tests were performed in single/double/triple thread orders, and each thread compile had it's own directory.
First test, all three had been make config'd per the original article, followed by make dep. After that, I rebooted and did all three compiles without rebooting. Second series started the process over again by make mrproper/make oldconfig/make dep/time make -jN bzImage, with N being the corresponding thread. Finally, I did a make mrproper/make oldconfig/make dep and rebooted each time before the compile.
I should note that on several occasions, I got Odd results; whether this was caching of some sort or not I don't know, but I would get 3m35s on a single thread and 1m9sec on a -j2 with a removed and recreated directory, as well as one or two other occasions - unfortunately, all the other occasions were when I was accidentally failing to use "time make -j2 bzImage" and instead was only doing "make -j2 bzImage", so I have no empirical proof. At any rate, here's the recorded ones.
Round 1
Straight
real 3m17.571s
user 2m54.660s
sys 0m13.120s
-j2
real 3m13.772s
user 2m58.390s
sys 0m13.390s
-j3
real 3m13.470s
user 2m59.390s
sys 0m13.180s
Round 2
Straight
real 3m8.048s
user 2m54.780s
sys 0m13.140s
-j2
real 3m11.912s
user 2m58.050s
sys 0m13.590s
-j3
real 3m12.532s
user 2m58.370s
sys 0m13.900s
Fresh-boot compile
Single thread was not redone; it was the Round 1.
-j2
real 3m15.634s
user 2m58.030s
sys 0m13.700s
-j3
real 3m16.433s
user 2m59.310s
sys 0m13.290s
As you can see, not much of a variation on here. The times are also a hell of a lot better than a 1.2GHz system single-threaded with DDR SDRAM, which makes me wonder what precisely is slowing down the 1.2GHz...
Food for thought.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
I don't believe this is flamebait.
The -j flags will certainly speed up a uniprocessor build if parts of the compilation
are IO, rather than CPU, bound.
I think the article is misleading. Wouldn't it be nice to see the *NIX community approach
its benchmarking with a similar level of objectivity to that it demands from others
(*cough* mindcraft *cough*).
Si
Make clean is not enough to restore original conditions.
When I do two kernel compilations in row,
the second is amost always faster, even though I do make clean and make dep.
The reclining dimm slots are there because the DDR memory for this motherboard is fairly tall, and Tyan would like to be able to use this motherboard on 1U rack systems. The reclining dimm slots does waste a lot of real estate, which could've been used to place the power connector closer to the edge. But the market for 1U rack mount systems appears to be growing rapidly, so I think the reclining dimm slot is very important.
For those of you that are complaining that they just bought a system or is looking to buy a system, this board isn't even supposed to be announced until March, so don't hold your breath.
Would be better. Linus and Alan say so. I think this has something to do with going into multiple directories and compiling there as well.
If you don't give -j2 on the command line, how do you suppose it would get in there?
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
win 98SE doesn't use more than one CPU ! Try NT (or Linux) instead !
Normally when you benchmark you try to change only one factor. If you change the code you're running and the number of CPUs then how do you know how much each factor is affecting the result?
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
There was even a fansite dedicated to the Abit BP6
;-)
That mobo sure was sweet. And back in Nov/1999 the Celerons 366 were only $35 !! (Which could quite easily be o/c to 550
One of my favorite uses for the dual celerons, was to start up a quake server on one cpu, and a quake client on the 2nd cpu.
Too bad the stupid SB Live driver's don't work under SMP mode.
I think it shows quite clearly that most people
here are concerned with the actual facts, not
just with making Linux look good.
Would make a nice reference the next time
Microsoft fakes a benchmark.
Read The F&*king Article.
Firt Line = "Dual processor DDR..."
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
- Now if only the right motherboards would start showing up in quantity on pricewatch
...
www.pricescan.com is a much better engine for searching prices.I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Shit yeah!!!
I've got a 386DX40, which I use for an extremly good xterminal.
--
Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
I tried the same test on my uniprocessor system, running first "time make bzImage" then "make clean", and last "time make -j 2 bzImage":
Single thread:
597.00user 46.40system 12:11.08elapsed 88%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (789303major+881687minor)pagefaults 0swaps
Two threads on one processor:
511.41user 31.30system 9:21.66elapsed 96%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (489357major+669019minor)pagefaults 0swaps
By the same logic as they used in this benchmark, my uniprocessor system is thus 31 percent faster than the same old uniprocessor system. Bah! I just wish people weren't posting nonsensible benchmarks like this. At least, they should _try_ to make it somewhat representable...
The second test may have been getting its
sources from the I/O cache. Did the guy
clean up before running the second test?
Yesthat board is a dual Athlon/DDR SDRAM system, Actually that chipset supports up to 8 CPUs just by adding an extra northbridge for every extra CPU, above the intitial 2 CPUs.
Because of the width of the board, if such a wide board is used in a smallish mid-tower case, the RAM can get in the way of the drives or vic-a-versa, the sloping RAM mostly negates that problem.,BR>
If you've seen the size of most 1.2GB T'bird Fansinks, I doubt you'd use it in a 1U case unless you use those fansinks that have the fan on the side (instead of the top) where the air blows across through the fins, like the Alpha PEP66.
Even then it'd be a tight fit.
& that's a boxed version from GoBe in the US, the European distributer does a better box set. With a full manual, 2 CDs & a boot floppy,
Linux 2.2.18 (Dual p3-550, 1Gb ram, all SCSI compiling Apache 1.3.17)
make
real 0m37.244s
user 0m23.900s
sys 0m6.000s
make -j3
real 0m26.915s
user 0m24.360s
sys 0m6.020s
make -j4
real 0m23.724s
user 0m24.130s
sys 0m5.880s
make -j5
real 0m20.154s
user 0m22.940s
sys 0m5.000s
make -j6
real 0m21.326s
user 0m24.120s
sys 0m5.830s
FreeBSD (Dual p3-550, 512Mb ram, all SCSI compiling Apache 1.3.17)
make
39.458u 5.635s 0:48.99 92.0% 1686+1874k 0+1249io 0pf+0w
make -j3
40.007u 5.725s 0:32.53 140.5% 1696+1884k 0+1645io 1pf+0w
make -j4
40.027u 5.817s 0:32.73 140.0% 1691+1877k 0+1631io 0pf+0w
make -j5
40.154u 5.832s 0:31.74 144.8% 1701+1884k 1+1628io 0pf+0w
No he was using a brain-damaged OS. My desktop, which does nothing more than run a TN3270 session, Lotus Notes and IE crashes at least once a week, usually more. The Microsoft answer to this is twofold:
a) It's not our fault, it's those nasty third-party vendors
b) You should spend a fortune redesigning your network and then a further fortune buying new licenses for Windows2000
Of course, as NT has no logs or core dumps worth a damn, there's no way to know what went wrong.
I just bought new mobo, tbird 1ghz, ata100 HD and 1gig o ram. The vendor tried to sell me a more expensive slot Athlon, he claimed that the Dual processor config for athlons will use Slots. Is this true?
DDR most likely means Double Data Rate SDRAM, which is not the same things as a dual processor system.
Oops. I'm wrong. My fault. Moderate down accordingly.
True, but the linked story states quite clearly that they tested a pre-release motherboard from Tyan running the AMD 760MP chipset, running two 1.2GHz Athlon CPUs.
Please check your facts before shooting your mouth off.
"Linux is broken! When I type date, it just gives me the time!"
how well does it run vi?!
Two minute kernel compiles sure sound nice. It took my PPro 32 minutes to do compile 2.4 yesterday. Still, I bet a brand new dual athlon system won't spit out dust while it compiles!!
The article states:
This isn't really a good way to compare single processor results to dual processor results. The make -j3 lets make run three processes at once, which would lead to a speedup even on a single processor system, because disk I/O and CPU-bound compilation can overlap. The only totally fair way to compare is to boot a non-SMP kernel, run the benchmark, then boot an SMP kernel and run exactly the same benchmark.
Even though the 142% speedup is bogus, the two minute kernel compile is pretty damn fast.
Or because it does pipe data from stage to stage without having to context-switch back and forth.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Windows 2000 allows you to log in before it has established any of the networking. A couple of times I've logged in while its still thrashing and the network connections didn't work until I rebooted.
Now I wait until the disk stops thrashing before I even touch the keyboard.
I've recompiled the kernels to add USB and reiserfs support. Arguing about recompiling them to remove services is futile -- comparing apples to oranges. tomsrtbt boots pretty damn fast after all.
> Is windows 2000 starting some of its services after the gui appears, just giving the impression
> it's finished booting, when, in fact, it's still doing stuff in the
> background It doesn't seem to be as much as a problem as with, say, windows 98.
Let me turn it around: are you counting the linux boot time as until you get to an X login prompt, or until you've logged in and GNOME or KDE has fired up all its little background processes?
It's amazing the amount of denial people can get into. But console yourself with this: I've never used a unix-based dev environment that just locks up for a minute while loading a big project the way MSVCrap does.
A.
I guess the layer count is high, but how does it compare with similar products? I've never thought of it that way. I know layer count does affect the cost of the board itself. I know a guy that does a lot of printed circuit board stuff, I'll ask him how high he's gone.
Anyhoo, I believe that the layer count has to do with the fact that there is a LOT of wiring associated with the particular bus type, er, well I understand that it isn't _really_ a bus, but I don't want to get into the particulars.
The Linux makefiles use the "-pipe" flag to gcc. This causes gcc to pre-process, compile and assemble in parallel, using pipes rather than temporary files. Thus, a straight "make" of a kernel already uses multiple CPUs if available (though in a pretty minimal way).
OK, exactly _how_ does playing MP3s slow down such a fast system? On my four year old 500MHz system MP3 playback 'only' takes roughly 1% CPU...
Or are your particular sound card drivers that inefficient? I've noticed some Linux sound drivers were _very_ slow. I never did inquire why.
The top 4 are 33 MHz 64 Bit PCI, and the bottom one is a 66MHz 64 bit PCI slot. Ah, we finally see the maximum thruput to this bus finally: 503.54 MB/sec = (8 bytes/clock cycle) * (66,000,000 clock sysles /sec)
The above is of course assuming 1 CPU clock cycle per transfer of data.
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
About AMD's upcoming dual systems is that each processor has a seperate bus to the memory, unlike intel systems where all the chips share the same bus.
The bad thing is that so far only Tyan has announced a MB based on the 760MP chipset and that MB is definitely suited for servers, won't fit in a standard ATX case.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Linuxisforcommunists.org
That's /exactly/ what I thought. What's /. coming to?
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Are those UW SCSI connectors at the bottom? Rad.
My Amiga does :)
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
>> I hated NT and its crashing every day!
You were probably simply using a brain-damaged kernel driver !!!! Nothing to do with NT itself ! Last time I checked I had not rebooted my dual proc w2k system for 47 days! (I am developing real-time 3D and real-time broadcast direct-to-disk video engines with a lot of multi-threading)
No ISA, and NO 32-bit PCI, it looks like... Those are 64-bit PCI slots, if I'm not mistaken. That dark one up top might be an AGP slot, though.
Peter
OMG! The first mobo/cpu combo I bought and built was an AMD 386dx40. I SMOKED the Intel stuff. I also bought my first SIMMS then, two 1mb beasties. Damn, a 15mb hard drive. I remember using Stack compression on it. Took forever to get that extra 14mb or so. Those were heady days my friend...
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Its too bad that the single processor benchmark didn't use -j2 or -j3 as well then.
142 percent seems nice. Now try compiling the kernel make -j2 on the single processor system and show me the real results.
Ok, did anybody actually realize the following: single: 4m:51s = 4x60s + 51s = 291s dual: 2m:00s = 2x60s = 120s 291 / 120 = 2.42 = 242% !!!! Thus, the dual system runs an amazingly 2.42 times faster than the single one! Doesn't take an engineer ...
Come on, mod me down.
Tom's Hardware (somewhat more reputable than the results discussed here) shows a more moderate improvement in performance, but it is definitely remarkable.
Go to www.tomshardware.com and have a look - get the real picture.
Now why aren't there any Q3A benchmarks??
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
but wouldn't a better test involve removing one of the processors, compiling a kernel (while running a non-smp kernel), and then lather-rinse-repeat with both processors in under an SMP enabled kernel? According to the make man page, the -j option contols the number of jobs allowed to run simultaneously. Depending on what you are making, the -jN option can even speed up compile times on single processor machines. The 142 percent "performance" increase may be partially explained by this.
As one of those dual-celeron guys (bang for the buck!), I love to see AMD finally show off dual processor machines. But the next time we get a chance to play with one, lets try to make a more realistic comparison.
Can't say _exactly_ how. I'm just reporting what I've seen from compiling the same large project multiple times on both systems, with or without other tasks running.
AMD is done with the "Slot-A" platform. They only used slot-type CPU's, because the "classic" Athlons had external cache chips.
Once the AMD Thunderbird came out, the cache now runs at full CPU speed, and is on the CPU's die. Thus, all current AMD Athlons are "Socket A" or "Socket-462".
There have been pictures floating around of this Tyan dual-athlon board. It clearly has two Athlon _sockets_.
However, the future AMD Clawhammer/Hammer platform (i.e. the K8) will not use the EV6 bus or the current socket arrangement. They indend to use something called a "NUMA" (Non-uniform memory access) bus, along with something called LDT (Lightning Data Transport). It'll be a new socket, incompatible with the older one -- but word has it that FSB speed will be something like 533 MHz (compared to 400MHz, 2x200MHz double-pumped for the Pentium4, and 200 or 266MHz DDR for current Athlons)
The "-j3" switch with the make is why it got a greater-than-linear improvement.
See Ace's Hardware for a discussion of exactly this:
"[T]he dual-processor test was performed with not just two, but, in fact, three make processes. The difference here is that a processor will not be completely idle while waiting on IO in the second test, as there are two additional build processes running concurrently. This is why the use of the -j parameter is often recommended even for uniprocessor systems, as a parallel make will often yield much higher CPU utilization and thus faster compiles."
Also, see reader comments saying that AMD demonstrated a 4-way SMP Athlon system at LinuxWorld.
Tastes Like Chicken
Guess what... it's the same thing. If the drivers are crash NT regularly then something is wrong with the product available to consumers.
Where do this comment lead ? Why not blame the hardware itself while your at it ? Trying to spread that "Crashes once a week" is a feature of w2k is just exposing your lack of technical understanding of what is going on. No OS is expected to prevent a kernel mode driver to crash the WHOLE machine. That's precisely where the strength of KMode lies ! So What ?
I stand corrected.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
This is why the use of the -j parameter is often recommended even for uniprocessor systems, as a parallel make will often yield much higher CPU utilization and thus faster compiles.
Why not, then, run both tests with the -j parameter. Then you will get the "real" numbers for the uniproc compilation and then it will actually be useful for a comparison to the dualie numbers.
But then again, why do that, and make the numbers useful, when you can spread your own FUD and claim that dualie Athlons are 142% faster under Linux than a uni system? Who cares what your testing methods are when you get the numbers you want? Gee whiz... I seem to remember Microsoft and Mindcraft getting ripped for doing the same.
And here's the pic
I sure would like to see a dual-Athlon w/ DDR operate that fast, but it doesn't. If you read the entire article you will see that they used make -j3 (3 threads going) for the SMP test. I'm not an expert or anything but I dont think that uses the full strength of the system only using 3 threads.. i would try "make zImage -j -l 1.6" that should work a little better.. For the proper comparison a non-smp kernel should be booted, then compiled with the same make command.. just my 2cents
SMP is more than twice as fast because of the way the compiler works; there's a process piping its output to the process in charge of the next compile step. Because two of these can run at the same time (one per CPU), the data doesn't have to be written to the disk between stages.
Please pardon the excessive simplification...
It's mathematically impossible for the dual-proc compile to be "142% faster" than the single-proc compile. Anything more than 100% faster indicates that it takes less than no time.
For example:
Single-proc compile: 100 seconds
Dual-proc compile: 25 seconds
In this case, the dual-proc compile is 75% faster than the single-proc compile. Conversely, the single-proc compile is 300% (4x-1x) slower than the multi-proc compile.
The math for the first calculation is: (1x - (1/4)x) = 75%
Flip this around and you get the math for the second calculation: (4x - 1x) = 300%
I know this is counter-intuitive for some people, but that's how percents work in the real world. Don't blame me.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
He did
make clean && make dep && time make bzImage
then
make clean && time make -j3 bzImage
read the article again! In SMP measurement, "make dep" step was missing, thus making those weird 142%!
Andrew
Guess I'm getting tired :-)
There are actually a lot of benefits to a dual-processor setup. I did a research project on the Linux scheduler for interactive users:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~rross/cs265/pap er.html
Afterward I put together a dual-celeron system and the improvement in the overall responsiveness and feel of the system was quite dramatic.
- Russ
Or, athlon it self in single mode. Here is a quick test I did this morning my self with my SMP system
:)
:)
:)
Supermicro P6DGE
PC100 512meg ram (this shouldn't matter since 256 is enuff, and the athlon machine had 256)
2 PIII-750's
I did things the same with the same kernel as listed on the web site.
first compile, didn't even do 'make dep' since the web site stated that he didn't do 'make dep'. TIME that is took was 5:19 Not bad at for a CPU that is 450mhz SLOWER. Then I was thinking cache. since I had lots of ram I ran the single compile again. and as expected much faster, infact This time I blew that athlon outa the water. 3:52 seconds (the single compile on the athlon was 4:51).
now, the DUAL CPU compile for me was 2:16.
with these numbers, I'm assuming that the first compile that athlon did was infact not cached. That means it's NO WHERE NEAR 142% faster in dual mode. infact that's impossible. just look at my first 2 single CPU compiles, the second one was 1:27 seconds faster.
in dual mode, naturally, the compile was done after data was cached, hence the 147%. ya know It's to early to do the math to figure the exact percentages. But it HAS TO BE a little over 100% faster for the ahtlon after you figure in cache I'm assuming. Because you look at my compile time in SMP, it is just a little more then 100% faster
here is the time output from my SMP compile
real 2m18.217s
user 3m51.580s
sys 0m18.560s
note: the user, just about the same as my sinlge CPU compile.
What does this prove? That the athlon isn't that much better or the intel isn't much better then each other. Infact with this data, I would have to take intel over athlon cuz the athlon is slow here. Yeah were not compairing apples to apples, but a human can C that the extra 450mhz doesn't yeild much at all, expecially in SMP. So that Ahtlon motherboad and CPU combo's better be 1/2 the cost of the intel for my to buy it. I mean, Y would I buy an SMP 1.2GHz athlon system, that performs as good at a 850mhz SMP intel system (assuming number were almost the same if I added 100mhz to my CPU's).
Well, this is the conclusion I came to. Seal with it.
And yes, this athlon system is still beta, I know that. It could get faster by release time.
-- Jason...
The Tyan SMP board uses an 8 layer PCB design!! The rumor is it will cost $500usd or more. I haven't seen anything about the board that would lead me to suspect that it doesn't comply to at least the extended-ATX standard. All of Tyan's high end dual CPU boards do.
You were probably simply using a brain-damaged kernel driver !!!! Nothing to do with NT itself !
Guess what... it's the same thing. If the drivers are crash NT regularly then something is wrong with the product available to consumers. The same holds true for Linux.
treke
I'm quite sure that the AMD MP760 chipset (which, among other things allows SMP) will find its way into many motherboards very very soon. Serious competition will come from Abits VP6 - the successor of the famous BP6. With so many operating systems supporting SMP (W2K, *nix and my favourite BeOS), how long before SMP becomes the de-facto standard? An interesting bit of trivia for the new Linux folk - BeBoxen had a utility called Pulse which showed distributed CPU usage, with the ability to turn individual CPU's on and off in real time. The designers of the utility had a hidden IQ test in the program - which would be triggered when the user turned both CPU's off. Gee, I miss the good old days.
Revolution = Evolution
Great. I've been running a dual P2 system for over a year, and just recently got a 1 gig Athlon. The Dual processors are nice but only in SMP sytems. (duh) The only reason why I found out about Linux was that I hated NT and its crashing every day! SO I installed Linux on the dual machine and never looked back since.
The DDR memory is nice, but its still too expensive for now. The money you save on the Athlons compared to P3's, the memory will suck out anyway. But if you're getting Dual P3's with DDR Ram well then you're screwed anyways.
I'm gonna wait till they refine the SMP in the Athlons before jumping on board that ship. There will be bugs that need to be worked out so it will prolly be cheaper to wait a little while.
Didn't Toms Hardware run a story on Dual AMD chips a while ago. I dont remember if they had any benchmarks or not. I'm too lazy to check, plus why shoud I do the work for you all! Ok. Gotta get back to work.
Later
Lord Arathres
stainless steel