----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Pardon me for being a bit grouchy, but this is sort of my turf. On Wed, 23 Mar 1994 11:59:54 EST DEBBIE LORDS said: > Now that I have your attention. According to a magazine article I >recently read (last month), the 66 mhz machine runs at 66 for internal >processing only, like doing a dir or a cd. But is that important? After >all, how fast can you read a whizzing directory listing? (And do you want >to?) > When it comes to the workhorse needs, like data i/o, the machine runs at >a whopping 33 mhz. Great. And we all know that what we are interested it is >using DATA, some of it intensely slow for slower machines. The DIR and CD commands are doing disk I/O just like your application is. The "internal" stuff that IS faster is the execution of individual machine instructions. In computational performance, the DX2-66 processors do have a small advantage over the DX-50 processors. I/O performance won't be any worse for a DX2-66 than a DX-50. > A 50 mhz machine runs at 50 for everything. No. Most of the I/O you're concerned about is done over the computer's I/O bus at 8mhz, or perhaps 12mhz, unless you have a local bus disk controller. Besides, The VESA local bus is not designed to run at faster than 33mhz (the local bus speed of a DX2-66) anyway, so you aren't gaining anything by having a DX-50 processor over a DX2-66 processor. > Also Pentium has not been the "saviour" that was hinted at. Walk >carefully, Pat. I'm not saying that Pentium is bad. I'm suggesting that >Pentium has not yet proven itself to those who closely watch hardware >development. For all the hoop-lah that preceded it, its been amazingly quiet >ever since. That gets me a little nervous. One of my colleagues recently did a comparison of systems. He compared machines which are roughly in the same performance class as the Pentium, and concluded that a P5-based machine has roughly the same performance as a variety of RISC-based low-end workstations, including low-end Alpha and PowerPC based systems. The advantage of the Pentium over these systems is $200-$4000 in price. While some of the more extravagant claims about Pentium performance may well be false, a P5-66 will definitely be a better performer than a DX2-66. One drawback of a Pentium is the ever-present heat problem, but a simple $10 cooling fan cures that. Dennis