[geeks] Phenom (was Holy Cow! OpenSolaris on a retail laptop?!?!?!?!)

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Dec 22, 2008, at 19:22 , Lionel Peterson wrote:

> On Dec 19, 2008, at 12:27 PM, nate at portents.com wrote:
>
>>>  As a side note, anyone ever monkey with the AMD Phenom 9100e CPUs  
>>> (4x
>>>  core at 1.8 GHz)?
>>
>> Phenoms models which aren't a xx50 series means it's a pre-B3  
>> stepping
>> (i.e. has the TLB erratum, which is typically worked-around in the  
>> BIOS by
>> disabling the TLB, lowering performance).  I'd recommend avoiding  
>> any xx00
>> Phenoms.  A Phenom 9150e is at least 10% faster than a 9100e  
>> because it is
>> a B3 stepping without the TLB design flaw.
>
> I don't quite follow the logic that it should be avoided because  
> there are versions of the CPU that are about 10% faster... I think  
> that 10% performance hit it reflected in the price.

I didn't know that operating systems like Linux and others were  
capable of running on X86 without the TLB.

I thought Linux in particular was pretty heavily tied to hardware task  
and TLB support on X86, which was one reason for its task switching  
speed.



-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."