Hello Lynn!
Sunday March 22 1998 00:06, Lynn Nash wrote to Jonathan Michaels:
 JM>> given a supermicro p6sne complete with an intel pentium pro
 JM>> 180 mhz (and fan) and 128 mb of full parity (synchronius)
 JM>> my question is, quite simple, is this combination enough
 JM>> horsepower to run os/2 warp v4.0 with the whole tcp/ip and
 JM>> other networking stuff loaded ?
 LN > Enough horsepower, enough horsepower??? PPro 180 and 128MB of
 LN > RAM? My friend, with what you plan to add to it, Warp 4 will
 LN > blow the doors off of most other things as it passes them by.
umm, thank you, er yes . i have read a lot of similar responces, forgive my
ignorance but it just dosent register. about the mly time i ever say a 
computer
that i like to work on was a mips 4000 seris sharing an ethernet connection 
o
a sun multi process (4 ultra sparcs, each with about 256 mb of lacal dram) 
this
made framemaker look like it was truning the page in a real book. this is 
hat
i am trying to emulate .. from all of the responces i have gotten so far it
looks like i might come close to doing just this.
while the above setup was a network/file server at a publish house .. a real
one, not like the majority of 'buero's that just use off the shelf mac's ..
grin.
 LN > :-) If you are brave you should be able to overclock it to
 LN > 200MHz.
what finally tipped my descision was a report from a friend who has a couple 
of
the early ones setup on other than supermicro motherboards that ar clocked at
233 mhz aand they run stable and relaible even through the australian summer
with just the std fan as fitted by intell and no extra case ventilation. to 
e
this means it should run at 180 mhz for a long while to come. this is what i 
am
really looking ofre .. i alread have a sola 400 unubterutable with builtin 
line
cnditioning to service the line in needs of this box.
 LN >  Now if you want to play the megahertz marketing game
 LN > with somewhat less memory then you are going to get all sorts of
 LN > conflicting answers.  Most of that has little to do with the
 LN > real world or running real applications.
yes, before, i settled on this combo i did the runaround to severl mac places
to see if i could get a genuine motorola powerpc on special order, apple has
gutted the original powerpc to meets its oen 'megahertz marketing game', a
shame really.
i saw a lot of pentium II's running win95 very badly might i add, well with 
6
mb even os/2 or evem linux would be a bit jerky.
what i failed to mention in my original post was that i have a specific taske
for this box to perform .. tht being to do a fleasability study with respect 
to
replacing an office envoronment of x windows workstation. they have gotten 
ld
and raged around the edges. one of thier it gurus mentioned nt, it choked 
hen
they got it, no real ip (just microsofts idea) and the horsepower .. dec 
alphas
and so much ram you could walpaper the room with it .. oh, and bfore i forget
they told us that the application really would have to be ported to dec/ms
alpha coded nt to get any real performance (read reliability)
i suggested os/2 and the xfree86 port to os/2 as thier still is not a 
elaible
or workable 'free unix' dos emulator that is realible enought to work in this
sort of environment (yes we tried linux, just fell over and complained about
the networking load and resource drain, and freebsd, this worked but not well
enough).
soapbox mode .. pity ibm has changed it os/2 marketing stratagy .. the nt
superman advertsing gimick (yuck).
soapbox mode off.
 LN >  The P-II 333MHz is the
 LN > first chip from intel that returns to the internals of the PPRO.
 LN > All the previous versions ran the cache at half speed.
yup, this is what i thought when i read the published specs, we would have to
go to smp to get performance, but out task is not suited to smp, and would 
have
t be ported, yes thier is much more support in the os/2 developers cd fro
application porting to os/2 but this is a step that we had hoped to overcome, 
i
mena avioded at any cost.
 LN >  Someone is giving you this?
yes
 LN >   That is one heck of a friend.
yes he is.
 LN >   Are you buying dinner or do you mean it is like for at work?
it is a complicted story, i was a systems analyst before i became a grumpy 
nd
irrtitable disabled person that cannot get employnent, i'm only 46 and have
been 'thrown on the scrapheap' because i am too old to be usefull. i do some
'toy consulting' to augment my pension (i don't what its would be called in 
you
part of the world, i am on social security benefits and will never be 
mployed
again because of my 'broken brain' caused disabilities).
while it is a gift as far as gifts go, it is a sort of thank you for 'work
done' in the past. also even in my 'devestated' state i am still every good 
t
what i used to do very well. sorting out hardware to meet specific task 
oals.
this company needs a platform to do a job and don't want to get into the 
ames
most of the proprierty solutions hose have gotten into.
these days if yo go to a software house to get a solution tailored, it is un
unwritten law that you will use the software houses recommended hardware, my
'clients' if i can use that relationship . do not want to be tied into such a
noose as it were.the market has changed and hardware is not as good as it 
sed
to be, example at point is the diference between the pentium pro and the
pentium II's.
from my calculations, a pentium II based processor would have to have about
twice the clock rate to out gun a pentium pro if all else remains the same.
actually i'd like to see how os/2 performs on a ms win95 specific chip (this 
is
what the primary purpose for the pentium II) os/2 and ms win nt and unix are
all 32 bit operating systems. ms win95 is a dos shell running on a 16bit
operating system with 8 bit internals .. this is why (i thnk) win95 was sucha
miserable failure on the 32bit clean pentium pro and why intel were 
ulldowsed
by microsoft into producng a chip that would "make win95 look good" in 
ssance
the pentium II's are now inextricable linked to ms win 95 one without the 
other
is a really sad story in term of 'performance'.
i have heard a lot of people who upgraded to pentium II's very shortly
'upgraded' from os/2 to ms win95 and started ahving allsorts of problems but
that is another story.
ps, they owe me a few more 'dinners' than i will ever owe them .. grin.
 JM>> are thier any real problems that i should look out for ?  or
 JM>> would a gigabyte motherbopard have been better ?  well for my
 JM>> next 486 failure i may get a gigabyte and a cyrix k6 or
 JM>> something like that.
 LN > K6 is from AMD by the way.
sorry about that, i get cnfused sometimes.
 LN >   It is a very good chip
this was my first choice and now that they are so cheap, i just may refirbish 
a
couple of my old freebsd intended boxed from i486dx33 to amd k6 and see what
happens.
 LN >  but I worry
 LN > if AMD can hold the line.  They just reported again, for another
 LN > quarter, that they are still losing money on each chip that they
 LN > ship, due of manufacturing yield problems.  Their bail out deal
 LN > for IBM to make chips for them is still months away.  Intel on
 LN > the otherhand says their yields are better than planned.  Seeing
 LN > blood, Intel has announced a 20 percent price decrease on most
 LN > of their chips.  If AMD has to reduce their prices another 20
 LN > percent and they are losing money at the current levels, big
 LN > trouble is brewing for them.  It is already bad enough that
 LN > their credit rating was lowered last week.
these are the incider stories that i hear all the way out her in the boonies 
..
grin, this is why i worry about the real competition in the market place,
especially now that compaq has purchased digital (and the alpha) and some 
ime
ago ibm abandoned the os/2 for dec alpha port .. now that would have been
someting to write home about.
clean code, well written and stable structures if thier ever could be a unix
competitor it would only have been os/2 and on the dec al;pha, a real
performance package that would give sun microsystems, motorola, mips, tandem
and amdhal a real run for thier money .. instead of the almost ran it is now 
on
a gutted intel (with ms call the shots) processor platform.
 JM>> currently i run warp v4 on a i486dx33 with 16 mb and an
 JM>> adaptec aha2542b and it is slugish to say the least ..
 JM>> especially with tcp/ip loaded and running peer to peer ..
 JM>> well i know i am old and slow but my system is slower than i
 JM>> am, grin.
 LN > Unless something is functionally wrong with the supermicro,
brand new, straight of the ship from supermicro ha somewhere in the us of a.
 LN >  you
 LN > are in for a real treat compared to what you are replacing.
 LN > Supermicro is a respected brand but like the other more
 LN > expensive motherboards
yes, the premium here is some 300 percent .. a ppro mb can be had for as 
little
as $AUD170, the p6sne is running at about $AUD600. even thier 'consumer' 
evel
mb's are about $AUD250, the same price as the upmarket corporate server level
offering of the other in this market place. my last good motherboard was 
either
a micron or a .. damn i forgot, eithr way it lasted, 8 years, still going but 
i
can only put 8 meg on the mother board so it is getting a little dated. but, 
it
still works as well as the day it was forst commissioned as a novel file
server and it hasnt missed a beat in all those years. this is one thing i
cannot say for the other 'cheap' equipment that most of my friends have
purchased for themselves .. i constatly hear the sob stories.
this is what i was hoping people would say about the supermicro, you hear so
little about them in ftn conferences .. i had hoped for abit more info, about
the company, but as you say most hobbyists stick to the hobby end of the
spectrum and that unfortunatel equates to the 'cheap' not so good quality 
ype
equipment .. ni disrespect intended. i come frop a place where relaibility 
nd
longterm performance matter far more than the saving of a couple of dollars 
n
the initial purchase price.. end living od social security benefits hasn't
knocked that one out of me .. yet, grin.
 LN >  you don't see them mentioned much in the
 LN > general hobbyists sector.  As I said, once installed, you will
 LN > see the humor in your question, perhaps in retrospect.  Just
 LN > don't be tempted to stick that aha1542b in there as an interim
 LN > solution for anything, unless you want an instant 112MB RAM disk
 LN > used as a swap file. You did say Warp 4 so if you must,
 LN > you could try the /DBUFF switch and see how it works for you.
yes, i did say warp4. though i had wndered about the isa and greater than 16
mb, dam memory addressing problem .. this is why, after the inital testing
phase i had intended to add another scsi drive ad devote it to freebsd with 
i
graphics 'accelerated x server' platorm, as a comparison to the os/2 xfree86
port.
because of several other issue i've all but given up on using the existing
aha1542b, i've decided to go with a new aha2940uw .. it mkaes snec to me. as
for the video card, well for me the matrox millenium and eiter 8 or 16 mb of
video dram is wher it has always been, back n the eraly days (1o odd years 
ago)
when we were building processcontrol systems and used matrox vido 
ccelerators
with 4 mb onboard and prices that would shock most people even today, for 
ust
the video subsystem.
 LN > However your I/O will still be about what you are getting now,
 LN > about a quarter of what the minimum your planned 2940uw will
 LN > provide.
well that settles it, 2940 is the way to go, and a smc 9432 (the 100/10 mb 
ec
chipped ethernet adapter) should make a reasonably well balanced os'2 
platform,
yes ?
 JM>> on another slightly different track, this motherboard (p6sne)
 JM>> has a ps/2 mouse port, and i think a ps/2 keyboard port as
 JM>> well, is this going to be a problem for os/2, i have
 JM>> converted to ps/2 mice, the only rodents that you can
 JM>> reliably get in 3 button mode.  i also got a brace of real
 JM>> ibm ps/2 keyboards a few years ago and have been using them
 JM>> quite happily via an adapter into the standard din5 socket on
 JM>> 'normal' motherboards .. sure beats having to get a new $65
 JM>> clone every 7 or so months, and, i don't miss the two or
 JM>> three extra 'microsoft' specific keys.
 LN > This particular board was very popular with the power users in
 LN > this echo before most of them departed for the internet or NT I
 LN > guess. The company appears heavily connected to intel and
 LN > doesn't do much with other chipsets.  They also provide the
 LN > bench set motherboards for the i2o initiative.  I have used it
 LN > and you should have no particular problem unless, as I said, it
 LN > is damaged in some way.
thank your for your most resounding vote of confidence. i was getting a 
ittle
worried, and concerned that i have yet again screwed up bigtime. usually for 
my
customers and thier deep pockets i nver (very rarely that is) made a serious
maistake, but my own limited budget has seen many not so good hardware
descision, sort of like those unforseen conflicts that only a studdied look
could reviel .. i suppose its like thos for any person in business, for your
client you will go the extra mile, but for yourself, well who cares i'lll get
it to work somehow .. sad grin.
 LN >  * SLMR 2.1a * After 40 years I realized Karma doesn't fall from
 LN > the sky
no it groes from the ground up .. like all good thngs.
your responce is muchly appreciated.
Jonathan
... i do what i can, with what i have, are you able to say the same ?
--- GoldED/386 3.00.Beta3+3022
(3:712/808)
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