[oclug] AMD, System Performance

[G. R. Gaudreau]

<snipped>
> >
> > Thanks, Pat. I guess that would mean that for a guy like me, the Duron
> > would be a good buy then? I don't game and I'm not into heavy graphics
> > or big spreadsheets and such. I just surf, do e-mail, downloads, HTML
> > authoring, word processing... yada yada yada... and spend a lot of
> > time tweaking the system and rooting around. Sometimes I break stuff,
> > but what the hell, I learn things about Linux and it's fun.
> 
> The Duron is likely to be pretty satisfactory, based on what you describe...
> 
> I'll take issue with the "big spreadsheets" part just a little; a whopping
> lot of the work involved with such come from running the "maze" of inter-cell
> dependancies, as opposed to being _strongly_ tied to (say) FP work.  And it's
> likely that "big," for a Duron, would represent a frightfully large amount of
> formulae and data...
> 
> A lot of peoples' work doesn't really strongly exercise FP or even CPU
> capabilities; it is _very_ common for system performance bottlenecks to
> lie elsewhere, notably:
>  - Network bandwidth
>  - Memory quantity
>  - Disk bandwidth/speed
>  - Sometimes (as with my Digital Multia!) memory bandwidth (e.g. - the
>    speed of the bus used for CPU to talk with RAM)
> 
> The focus on how many MHz you've got demonstrates that the computer marketing
> folk have succeeded at convincing people that MHz are the only "important"
> metric...

Thanks, Chris, I'll bear those comments in mind. Maybe I'll keep my
K6-2 400 Mhz for a bit longer, seeing as it works well. Maybe I'll add
some more memory, since it's been dirt cheap for a while now, and
upgrade my HDD to something faster.

-- 
Cheers,
G. R. Gaudreau
http://www3.sympatico.ca/revgr/