look at the size of.....

Blitzkrieger

....the Von Neumann bottle neck on this :

dual PIII 1Ghz,
256Mb SDRAM,
2 X 10 Gb SCSI hard drives,
etc, etc,


This is the kind of machine I was thinking of blowing a bomb of money on at the end of the summer but what's the point really when the bloody buses will still be only 100Mhz! It's ****ing ridiculous that the Von Neumann bottle neck has been the biggest problem in computing for at least a quarter of a century and not only have they done nothing about it - they are making it worse!

**** a 1Ghz chip - I want a 1Ghz bus!

_CreeD_

Get Athlons. The Ev6 bus offers 1.6GB/s@100Mhz point to point - on the GTL+ (INtel) system you only get 800Mb/s@100Mhz shared with all CPU's , with the EV6 each CPU has it's own 1.6GB pipe to play with.

And with that level of CPU horsepower I'd get a lot more RAM, it's cheap at the mo and not worth skimping on.

sutty

ram's cheep at the moment???? where the hell have I been looking??????????

Gerry

the 1ghz p3 runs on a 133 bus, and the more sensible solution is to buy to 733's and overclock them to 950 odd, with a far higher busspeed, which has far more memory bandwidth than an athlon on a 100mhz bus . For example I run my 600 on a busspeed anywhere from 143 to 165 mhz, which gives excellent memory bandwidth.

Blitzkrieger

I was under the (mistaken) impression that the 133Mhz bus on the P3 was scrapped cos of memory problems.

I don't want to get an Athlon cos I heard that the P3s are out-performing them at higher speeds.

Over-clocking is probably a good idea but I couldn't be assed. Plus the chip won't last as long.

_CreeD_

Gerry, at 165 (presuming all your other components can handle it) thats 1.32Gb/s shared between all CPU's, it still doesn't match the 1.6Gb PER Cpu in the Ev6. Granted you still have only 1Gb/s for the RAm at 133Mhz (VIA KX133 chipset supports it) (Which you can also overclock on an Athlon board in the same way you would for a P-III) but you have the extra bandwidth for the peripheral buses (AGP/PCI whatever). AMD are slow to market Multi CPU chipsets (I think VIA have one) but with Thunderbird that will change.

Blitz, that was the RIMM problem you were thinking of. The PIIIE is a coppermine core, the PIII-B or -EB is a 133mhz FSB cpu, though running these on I820 chipsets is a bad idea as it uses a translator for SDRAM that works out to be slower than using an older BX chipset board.
The PIII-E cache speed is full CPU speed (Eg. 733Piii = Cache at 733Mhz), so for many things it will pull ahead of an athlon, but not all. AMD are releasing 2 new revisions, the Spitfire and Thunderbird that will do basically the same thing. BAre in mind that AThlons are MUCH cheaper and more available than high end P-III's, and still win in many operations, lose in some but by no means a lot.
Overclocked CPUs dont necessarily mean lower lifespan, just keep the whole thing cool.....HAve a look at the prices on Overclockers.co.uk.....

Gerry

Creed, I think 1 cpu at 900+ mhz is enough for me. I am well aware of the limitations of the GTL+ bus. However dual athlon motherboards will be even more expensive than single athlon motherboards because of their complexity. I would wait and see how much real world speed up there is on a dual athlon cpu system. On a dual p3 system, quake3 gives up to 50% speed up, and other programs give up to 60%. RC5 cracking, which is not memory or bus intensive gives 100% improvement on a dual p3.
In my own case, the cpu is well capable of 1 ghz, but the memory I am using is only pc100. The hard drive and graphics card appear to be able to handle 165 fsb reasonably well, because it will play quake3 for a while at this speed. I will be upgrading the memory soon to high quality pc133 ram, which I will be able to run at cas-2 at at least up to 150 mhz. atm I have to slow down the memory settings.

Yossarian

I recommend you do what im doing....waiting.
In Q3/Q4 Amd will be releasing the Mustang chip, this will be more an improved version of the Thunderbird/Spitfire. It will have multiprocessor support. They will also be releasing a new chipset (VIA also i think) with SMP support and DDR support. DDR memory should do a lot more to remove the cvurrent memory bottleneck at a reasonable price (unlike Rambus).
As regards PIII's outperforming current Athlons, this is partialy due to the cache configuration of the high speed Athlons. The cache is located on a seperate chip and running at a fraction of the processor speed (less than half). The new versions of the Athlon (Thunderbird, spitfire , Mustang) will have this cache on the processor core, running at the full speed. This will give result in a significant performance increase.

Intel are still flogging Rambus as the solution to the memory bottleneck. At the moment this is way too expensive and doesnt look like it will drop significantly in price any time soon. You can use PC133 memory but, i think this causes a hit in performance due to the way the MTH is implemented on the motherboard.

Stephen.

Gerry

cool name Yossarian I think I will change mine to Major De Coverley