[rescue] looking for SGI system, cheap

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 10:38:08AM -0800, Steven M Jones wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 10:17:21AM -0800, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> >
> > The primary exception to the "reasonably fast" statement is web browsing;
> > all the browsers I've tried are excruciatingly slow to load, and have pretty
> > dismal page-rendering speeds, too.
> 
> This reminds me... I have a 250MHz R4400 purple Indigo2, and back
> around 1999-2000 I was running distributed.net rc5-64 clients on a
> lot of machines. Anytime I tried to run it on my I2, or on the
> Origin 200 at work, it yielded abysmal performance numbers. Just
> an order of magnitude off what I would have expected for the class
> of hardware.
> 
> I was just wondering if these two anecdotal accounts add up to an
> explanation in some list members mind. Sure, it could just be
> "poor coding," but ...

I think that the web browser is just poor coding.

The RC5-64 performance may have had to do with the CPU instruction set.
My recall is that RC5 wants a specific type of rotate that MIPS doesn't
have but Pentiums do have.  Therefore, the rorate portions of rc5 take
twice as many cycles to compute.  Further, RC5 can be coded, and
distributed.net did code it, to take advantage of MMX and SSE, and I
don't think that either the R4.4k or the R10k have any SIMD
instructions. 

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/