[SunRescue] help with CPU ID

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> They don't seem that slow to me.  :)  I've got dual SM41's in my SS20 at
> home, and it's not screaming fast, but I am running Solaris7 (bordering on
> bloatware?).  I'd love to get some (1?) faster CPU, but I'm not willing to
> shell out the money to buy one just yet.  Those CPUs should work nicely for
> a home system without too much heavy interactive use, I'd think.

Solaris 7 is quite fast (but heavyweight) for everything except SGML
manpage formatting.  It's an order of magnitude slower than nroff.

The other reason that using SM41's in a SS20 isn't such a hot idea is that
they slow the mbus from 50MHz to 40MHz, losing the primary advantage of
the SS20 over the SS10.  A faster CPU (SM50, SM61 or up but not the SM51)
will give a greater boost than you might expect as CPU to motherboard
bandwidth will go up by 25%.

Going to a pair of SM50's probably isn't worth the effort as even though
your memory latency will go through the floor you won't see much
improvement for CPU-bound activities.  SM61's are probably the practical
minimum upgrade.  A cheap pair of slower HyperSPARCs (90MHz and up) would
also be a good fit.

-James