On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Tom Samplonius wrote:
>
> On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, FreeBSD Mailing List wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Rod Ebrahimi wrote:
> >
> > > Recently I was looking into some of Dell's server systems and found that
> > > they offer Pentium II 233mhz and 266mhz... I was wondering if anyone had
> > > any experience with these types of systems (Pentium II) or knows how they
> > > will interact with FreeBSD...
> > >
> > The PPro is still faster for a true 32-bit OS, primarily due to the fact
> > that the L2 is 1:1 with the CPU clock. On the Pentium II, the L2 caching
> > is at 1/2 the CPU clock.
>
> Not, not quite. At the same clock rate, the PPro is faster, but the PII
> can operate at 266mhz, while the PPro maxes at 200mhz.
>
> > The PII runs 16-bit software better and adds MMX extensions, but for a
> > network server the PPro will still be faster.
>
> The PII/266 will be faster than a PPro/200.
Not buying into Intel's slot 1 ploy is a good enough reason not to run
PII's. Slot 1 is not going to be around very long and I wouldn't count
on not running into bugs in the relatively untested slot 1 chipset.
The PPro chipset is known to be robust. FreeBSD systems have run
stably on it for quite a while now. It just works.
Slot 1 is also entirely proprietary -- Intel's response to more
competition than it likes from AMD and now Cyrix.
The PPro 200 offers all the CPU horsepower you're going to need on
a FreeBSD network server. I'd worry about the amount of RAM and
the speed, latency, and number of hard drives. SCSI, of course.
regards,
Craig