What do you guys thing about the P4

[Tim Carlson]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> I have nothing for the P4, and at their current prices am not likely to
> in the short run, although I confess that I'm a slut and if somebody
> wanted to give me one I'd be more than happy to run it through its paces
> and report on it.

Well if all you are doing is inverting (big) matricies all day long.. Then
you just have to buy a P4. :)

Here is my favorite benchmark.. How fast can octave invert my random
2000x2000 matrix. Non-blas plain vanilla octave. Same RPM on both
machines. Same kernel.


time octave < test.m

----test.m-----
inv(rand(2000));
quit
----

1.5G P4 with 512 PC800 RDRAM

real    1m11.479s

vs. a dual P3/1G with 512M PC133 SDRAM

real    4m13.391s

I mean there is really no comparison. The P4 with a 50% faster CPU beats
the PIII by a factor of almost 4. Pretty much in line with the standard
stream numbers. 

Tim
---
Tim Carlson
Voice: (509) 375-5978
Email: Tim.Carlson at pnl.gov