Performance issues

[Bill Northcott]

> >
> Motherboards like Tyan Trinity GC-SL (for Pentium 4, not even a Xeon)
> have PCI-X slots run 64 bits wide @ 133 Mhz. 

They are not common.  The standard Intel chip sets only support 
32bit/33MHz PCI on P4 computers.

>With a SCSI RAID
> controller two  U320 SCSI channels you could do 640 MB/sec and still
> have bandwidth to spare.  Plain old bus-mastered PCI 2.2 can do 133
> MB/sec.

Data thoughput is not necessarily the main issue unless you are using very 
large data files like video.
Latency is much more important in most applications.  Which is why high 
end Macs and powerful number crunchers use Level 3 cache memory and modern 
RAID controllers boast Gigabytes of DRAM and very sophisticated caching 
algoritms.

Pentium 4 PCs are primarily optimised for playing 3D games for the 
sensible reason that the games players are the ones who buy the high end 
machines.  The best datapaths on the board are between the CPU and the 
Video card, which is as it should be for such use.  It is not usually the 
way you want to optimise for general dataprocessing.
OTOH Apple optimise their machines for handling large files and use a CPU 
with a vector processor which is extremely fast at performing tasks such 
as video and audio compression and image processing effects.  This is 
obviously because Apple's power user want those attributes.  Chacun a son 
gout.

Bill Northcott

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