Some senseless babbling from Jonathan Michaels to Lynn Nash
on 03-29-98  23:52 about Motherboards and os/2...
[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.
[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. 
[snip]
This is very interesting to me.  What calculations exactly lead you to 
believe that?
I can find nothing that leads me to believe that a Pentium II is not faster 
than a Pentium Pro MHz for MHz, all else being equal.
I am currently using a Pentium II/233 overclocked to 266MHz, with a 75MHz 
bus.  
The Intel SpecWhatever benchmarks clearly show the Pentium II faster.
I'm certainly not above questioning Intel's integrity, but my own 
experiences have confirmed this.
For example, with Java benchmarks I've done myself, my speed is very much 
faster than 200MHz Pentium Pro machines (using Windows NT).  
It's certainly true that Pentium II's are not optimized for 32-bit 
performance, but that's not a sacrifice of it, so far as I can see.  
I searched high and low for all speed information I could find, and nothing 
showed the Pentium Pro faster than a Pentium II at the same clock rate, 
much less twice as fast.  In fact, a normal Pentium with MMX (which isn't 
important - the larger internal cache is) at 200MHz is only marginally 
slower than a Pentium Pro at 180MHz.  A Pentium/233 with MMX is faster.
Granted, there are other factors which would show a Pentium Pro to do 
better, probably, due to its superior branching, prediction, etc.  But none 
of these internal features are absent in the Pentium II, and in fact 
enhanced.
While the L2 cache is decoupled from the same die, it sits right next to 
the chip in the processor module, accessed at chip speeds, never touching 
any motherboard bus.  
I upgraded to this chip from a Pentium/200 (non-MMX, with the normal 
internal cache), and clocked at 266MHz with the 75MHz bus, it's right about 
twice as fast in raw processing power.  Encoding a MPEG-1 Layer-III audio 
stream with a 44.1KHz sampling rate, joint-stereo, and a 128KBps stream 
speed took about 2.6 minutes per minute of audio on the Pentium/200, and 
takes about 1.3 minutes per minute of audio on this machine.  
The memory subsystem on this one is also better, using SDRAM at the 75MHz 
bus speed, as opposed to 60ns 72-pin DRAM SIMMs on the other machine, but 
given the synchronous nature of a streamed file encoding, I'd wager than 
the L2 cache of each processor essentially nullified the effect on 
performance of the memory.
That's my say.  I'm very interested to here what kind of calculations you 
did.  And if there's any kind of rough speed testing I can do for you here 
(I've got XFree86 installed here, and am using a Matrox Millenium card), 
let me know.
Mike Ruskai SA/AG #1106
thanny@home.com
... But how do we know your the REAL Angel of Death?
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