*BSD News Article 85804


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From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@freebsd.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Pentium Pro and FreeBSD
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 1996 21:15:08 -0500
Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine
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Tony Porczyk wrote:
> 
> "John S. Dyson" <dyson@freebsd.org> writes:
>
> >It appears to be generally approx 2X a P5-166.  I have been
> >working on P6 specific improvements also to gain even more.
> 
> I noticed a great difference in price between PP200 and PP180 that
> doesn't seem to be justified just by the 10% higher clock speed (almost
> twice the price).  Is there something about PP200 that goes beyond the
> clock speed improvement?  I am about to order the new system
> (components) within the next two days (thanks IRS for forcing stupid
> schedules), and I'm grappling with this question right now.
>

I am a bit of a crazy person, and play with running my PPro-180 at
speeds between 180 and 233 with success and no failures.  It is
NOT a good practice to run a 180 at 233, but works for some people.
(Of course, make sure that your processor has a good fan, and I have
heard through the grapevine that the 512K cache is a bit more of a
problem at high speeds than the 256K cache.)

I would NOT entertain running an overrated processor in a production
system, but for a single user desktop that isn't mission critical, it
isn't that bad an idea.  Note that I really don't see that much of
a speed difference running at 180 vs. 200, and at both speeds, my
processor runs as expected, with the performance associated with the
running clock rate.

Both the L-word and FreeBSD are making improvements to the kernels to
support the advanced features of the PPro and P5.  FWIW, I do prefer
the PPro in general, and would even entertain getting a PPro-150 if my
budget was tight (instead of a top-end P5.)  I would like to
look at some of the latest generation Cyrix/AMD parts also -- people
sometimes put them down, but I certainly could not design one of those
thingies :-).

John