kony wrote:
<It would definitely be faster on a better system. 5 x
450MHz systems are not going to be any better than 2 x 2GHz
systems for most tasks and will use a lot more power, heat,
maintenance, etc. Main benefit to old systems is they're
cheap, but then you might find a $20 1GHz P3 you could
upgrade some of those 450MHz systems with, depending on the
specific motherboard. Depending on the application, things
like SSE2 support might help also. >
actually, this is probably not true. even though the 5x450s are slower
on a large scale basis, each one has it's own processer core and other
stuff, as well as it's own RAM, while the 2x1 ghz setup has only two
cores, it is actually slower.
Own processor core and ram doesn't matter. The simple truth
is that each individual core, on it's own, will be less than
40% as fast, they are the common bottleneck. Until that
bottleneck is releaved, separate memory busses won't matter
much. This is only in general, some uses stress memory bus
more than others but on the other hand, the 450MHz systems
each have only 100MHz SDR memory bus so just moving to a
DDR400 memory bus in itself is enough to offset that.
Moreso than the things you'd mentioned, you'd have to look
at the ability to multithread the workload and segment it.
Even then, it might still run faster on a pair of 2+GHz
hyperthreaded or dual cores.
