MR>Some senseless babbling from Jonathan Michaels to Lynn Nash
MR>on 03-29-98  23:52 about Motherboards and os/2...
MR>[snip]
 JM> i saw a lot of pentium II's running win95 very badly might i add, well
 JM> with 16 mb even os/2 or evem linux would be a bit jerky.
MR>[snip]
 JM> hardware is not as good as it used to be, example at point is the
 JM> diference between the pentium pro and the pentium II's.
 JM> from my calculations, a pentium II based processor would have to have
 JM> about twice the clock rate to out gun a pentium pro if all else remains
 JM> the same.
MR>[snip]
MR>This is very interesting to me.  What calculations exactly lead you to
MR>believe that?
MR>I can find nothing that leads me to believe that a Pentium II is not 
ster
MR>than a Pentium Pro MHz for MHz, all else being equal.
MR>I am currently using a Pentium II/233 overclocked to 266MHz, with a 75MHz
MR>bus.
I noticed that you have overclocked your bus, obviously to overclock
your PII. Did you include the increased memory speed in your
calculations?
MR>The Intel SpecWhatever benchmarks clearly show the Pentium II faster.
Single tasking benchmarks, raw speed is not everything. Several
magazines reported at the time that multi-tasking and server performance
showed dramatically different results with a real application mix.
Unfortanately when this debate was going on I did not save any of these
references. They were more in things like computer reseller news, VAR
report etc.  This same debate occured over the 486DX-50 versus the
486DX2-66.  Intel's solution at that time was simply to remove the DX-50
from their benchmarks.  Current advertizing seems to show that they have
done the same thing with the PPRO. I would guess that the tiny nuances
when doing real work must be difficult to explain and the world has
become used to using synthetic benchmarks for comparisons.
MR>I'm certainly not above questioning Intel's integrity, but my own
MR>experiences have confirmed this.
MR>For example, with Java benchmarks I've done myself, my speed is very much
MR>faster than 200MHz Pentium Pro machines (using Windows NT).
Does this mean that your Java benchmarks were also on NT or are you
comparing apples to oranges? I mean everyone fights over Java
benchmarks, it is the current spectator sport.
MR>It's certainly true that Pentium II's are not optimized for 32-bit
MR>performance, but that's not a sacrifice of it, so far as I can see.
MR>I searched high and low for all speed information I could find, and 
thing
MR>showed the Pentium Pro faster than a Pentium II at the same clock rate,
MR>much less twice as fast.  In fact, a normal Pentium with MMX (which isn't
Mike simple logic at this point should tell you that if the cache speed
is cut in half, something should change if the clock rate is the same or
the benchmarks are not stressing cache/memory performance.
MR>important - the larger internal cache is) at 200MHz is only marginally
MR>slower than a Pentium Pro at 180MHz.  A Pentium/233 with MMX is faster.
MR>Granted, there are other factors which would show a Pentium Pro to do
MR>better, probably, due to its superior branching, prediction, etc.  But 
one
MR>of these internal features are absent in the Pentium II, and in fact
MR>enhanced.
At the time of introduction even PC Weak did not agree with that
assessment on initial testing. I believe what they said was that it
seemed to be enhanced to make Win95 perform better. One must then ask
the question, why did Win95 perform badly on the PPRO to start with
since the CPU portions of both chips are essentially the same
architecture all the way down to having the same bugs.
MR>While the L2 cache is decoupled from the same die, it sits right next to
MR>the chip in the processor module, accessed at chip speeds, never touching
MR>any motherboard bus.
True for the PPRO, not true for the P-II. On the P-II it sits on the
cartridge circuit board requiring receiver/driver logic and is the
reason access speed was cut in half. PPRO is CPU clock speed, P-II is
(CPU clock speed)/2
MR>I upgraded to this chip from a Pentium/200 (non-MMX, with the normal
MR>internal cache), and clocked at 266MHz with the 75MHz bus, it's right 
out
MR>twice as fast in raw processing power.  Encoding a MPEG-1 Layer-III audio
MR>stream with a 44.1KHz sampling rate, joint-stereo, and a 128KBps stream
MR>speed took about 2.6 minutes per minute of audio on the Pentium/200, and
MR>takes about 1.3 minutes per minute of audio on this machine.
I have no problems with those comparisons to the Pentium as they seem
spot on.
--Lynn
 * SLMR 2.1a * Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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