Interview With Kernel Hacker Dave Jones

A reader writes "Kerneltrap has recently interviewed Dave Jones who currently lives in London, employed by SuSE as a Linux kernel hacker. In the past six months since he graduated from the University of Glamorgan he has gotten involved in an impressive range of kernel related projects, including Powertweak, x86info, OProfile and the Kernel Janitors Project. Additionally, he maintains a -dj patch for the 2.5 development kernel, helping to sync it with the stable 2.4 kernel as well as offering increased stability. "

Comments

Re:Athlon...

[Sivar]

That doesn't sound very likely. The only significant architectural advantages that the P3 has over the T-bird are SSE and a much wider L2 cache (256 bit VS the Athlon's 64-bit)
In the majority of real-world applications, a T-bird will be within 5% of the speed of the P3. Sometimes 5% faster, sometimes 5% slower, or somewhere in-between (depends onthe application).
If you have an Athlon system (which has a clockspeed advantage, no less) that "seems" slower, it is likely either a hardware problem, as in some other component of the system is holding it back, or you suffer from the 'feel good' feeling that some people have with an Intel chip VS. anyone else.
Not that the P3 isn't a good chip--far from it. It is amazing that it can compete with the Athlon (other than in clockspeed) with a core that was designed almost 7 years ago. It is a tribute to Intel's engineering prowess.
If only the P4 was a tribute to anything but consumer ignorance.
"P4 is 2GHz. Ath-a-lon is 1.6GHz. 2 is bigger than 1.6, therefore P4 is faster."
By that logic, every CPU on earth has the same performance, so it doesn't matter other than how high you can get he clockspeed. I guess a 1GHz IBM Power4 is slower than a 1.3GHz Pentium-4. (or not...)

That said, if your Athlon system has a 100MHz FSB, something is wrong. The only chipset that defaults to such as speed is the prehistoric AMD750, which doesn't work with T-birds anyway. It is also not a DDR chipset. Come to think of it, the i815 (which is a great chipset) supports a 133MHz FSB as well. Was that a typo?

Charles Burns