Re: seti@home

dan (dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Sun, 11 Jul 1999 10:46:45 -0400

Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> Michael S. Lorrey writes:
>
> > A Celeron, put quite plainly, is a POS. It has a really pissy small
> > cache. A dual PII 450 actually is faster than just a 900 equivalence.
>
> Not so. An overclocked 300A (if you can get'em) is actually almost
> always faster than equivalent PII/450 (size doesn't always matter ;).
> Nota bene, there are also dual-CPU Celerons boards out there.
> Currently the best deal for the money by far.

I've been using my new Linux box for about a week. It's a dual celeron300A, overclocked to 466Mhz. I picked this system to optimize processing horsepower per dollar. Sure, dual PII450s are faster for some applications, but they are a lot more expensive, and the celerons are faster for other applications. The Celerons have less cache, but they access the cache in one front-side bus cycle. the PIIs have more cache, but they access the cache in two bus cycles.

I didn't use a dual-celeron motherboard. I used a dual slot 1 board instead.
This means I can convert over to PIIs or PIIIs if intel should ever inadvertently manufacture a cheap, overclockable version as they did for the Celeron. To use the celeron in a slot 1, you first place the celeron on a "slocket". Works great.

Why is this Extropian? well, It shows that computers are getting very fast and very cheap. This is helping to drive the astounding proliferation
of Open Source software. At this point, the only reason to buy software is inertia, or if the software is extremely specialized. This may be a model for an "Open Stuff" economy that could occur with Drextech.