Re: NEC-LIST: Suggestions for fastest Intel architecture

At 09:02 PM 10/11/01, you wrote:
>I belive the bottleneck is now with the (data rates of the) hard disk. If
>you are refering to systems using ATA100 (viz-a-viz ATA66 or perhaps SCSIw
>), the ATA100 is a small improvement over the ATA66. It takes ages to save
>the contents from the RAM into the harddisk.

Off topic but interesting. Perhaps I can help.
I agree that the hard disk system is the current bottleneck for
most Windoze applications.

The ATA100 interface is just part of the puzzle. The
chipset, drive settings, and size of the hard disk cache are
very important. My current favorites are the Intel 815E chipset
and the various IBM IDE 7200rpm hard disks with the 2MByte cache.
There are many ATA100 drives with slower rotational speeds and
smaller caches.

It's also possible to end up with a misconfigured drive. See the
"Feature Tool" at:
   http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm#FeatureTool

I'm not sure of whether the hard disk is a bottleneck for
NEC/mini-NEC. I use NEC4WinVM which does very little disk
bashing if there's sufficient RAM. I suspect that floating
point performance and available memory for array math is the
limiting factor for NEC/mini-NEC.

Flushing RAM to the hard disk is an operation where the HD
cache offers no benifits. Write perfomance is additionally
limited by the necessity to write to the FAT (file allocation
table) as well as the data. These are on different parts of
the drive and will cause substantial head movement.

The real bottleneck is cost and diminishing returns. Beyond
a certain point (that constantly changes), one needs to spend
a substantial incrimental increase in cost, to get a small
improvement in performance. For example, adding an additional
processor, or monster memory upgrade, may not yield a proportional
increase in performance. With a 50% depreciation in value per
year, computers are a bad investment. Therefore, I suggest one
buys conservatively and with a 1-2 year useful life. For those
that insist on the absolute latest and fastest, see:
    http://www.tomshardware.com
    http://www.overclockershideout.com
    http://www.hardocp.com
for the lunatic fringe. (I had an overclocked Celeron 400
running at 660MHz with a water cooled head sink and aquarium pump.
It eventually blew up).

--
Jeff Liebermann   150 Felker St #D   Santa Cruz CA 95060
(831)421-6491 pgr  (831)426-1240 fax  (831)336-2558 home
http://www.LearnByDestroying.com   WB6SSY
jeffl_at_comix.santa-cruz.ca.us       jeffl_at_cruzio.com
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