[SunRescue] help with CPU ID

[Gregory Leblanc]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Lockwood [mailto:lockwood at ISI.EDU]
> Sent: Thursday, September 16, 1999 10:27 PM
> To: 'rescue at sunhelp.org'
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] help with CPU ID
> 
> 
> 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%.

Will that really make that big of a difference?  I've never had any time to
actually see what changing the bandwidth between the CPUs and the rest of
the system actually does for performance on any architecture.

> 
> 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.

Any idea what kind of prices I should look for?  Does anybody have a couple
of the above CPUs that they'd want to trade/sell?  :)   Thanks,
	Greg
> 
> -James
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Rescue maillist  -  Rescue at sunhelp.org
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>