Performance question between single and dual setup

[DragonFire]

How fast would a single cpu have to be to equal the performance of a dual P2 333 overdrive system?

I realize that even a P3 at 450Mhz would be faster then a P2 333 but how fast would a single cpu have to be before it was able to do better then the dual setup at say....video encoding? or any other smp task?

 

[3chordcharlie]

Well any P3 will be faster than dual P2-333 at most things, including multi-threaded stuff.

Generally gains from going dual in multi-thread apps is 30-80% over one of the same processor. But P3 has SSE which tends to come into play in a lot of encoding apps I believe.

 

[FullRoast]

I guess the easy answer would be that a dual system cannot provide better than 2x performance, so it would be what ever cpu is twice as fast as a 333 MHz P2. A 450 MHz P3 is probably close; a 600 MHz P3, should be more than double the 333 MHz P2.

 

[Twsmit]

Originally posted by: FullRoast
I guess the easy answer would be that a dual system cannot provide better than 2x performance, so it would be what ever cpu is twice as fast as a 333 MHz P2. A 450 MHz P3 is probably close; a 600 MHz P3, should be more than double the 333 MHz P2.

yes but a dual system rarely provides anything even close to 2x performance.

I would say go with the P3 because it has SSE and a faster FSB. The P2 233 was a 66mhz FSB chip, while the P3 450 was 100mhz. Your taking a much higher clocked CPU, with SSE and a faster bus/memory against two fairly slow dual chips.

While the duals may win in a benchmark, maybe two (that is multithreaded) the P3 will PWN the rest of the time.



EDIT: Just reread your post. So you have 333mhz chips... oops. What FSB are they running off of? They are overdrive chips so i expect the performance to be lower than what a stock P2 can perform.

 

[FullRoast]

Originally posted by: Twsmit

yes but a dual system rarely provides anything even close to 2x performance.

I know, that's why I said "the easy answer", just to bound the answer. 🙂


DragonFire - Maybe you could explain what's behind the question?

 

[3chordcharlie]

The lower bound works too for the P2... it will never be appreciably slower than a signle P2-333.

(This wasn't true for original pentium smp, with shared cache, as I recall - in single-threaded apps, a dualie was actually slower than a single processor).

 

[DragonFire]

Originally posted by: FullRoast

Originally posted by: Twsmit

yes but a dual system rarely provides anything even close to 2x performance.

I know, that's why I said "the easy answer", just to bound the answer. 🙂


DragonFire - Maybe you could explain what's behind the question?

I have a dual Pentium Pro board with two 200Mhz 512K cpus which can be upgraded using two Intel P2 333Mhz overdrive's or should I just throw them out and look for some cheap P3 on ebay?

Iv seen a few P3 xeon's floating about now for real cheap.....

EDIT:

the overdrives are nothing more then P2 cores put on a socket 8 board. Didnt P2's come with SSE? Also I'm pretty sure they come with the 512K cache on die.

 

[Lonyo]

Get a cheap Athlon and Shuttle or ABit NF7 motherboard and build a cheap new modern rig 😛

 

[DragonFire]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
Get a cheap Athlon and Shuttle or ABit NF7 motherboard and build a cheap new modern rig 😛

I have thought about that but I already have a P Pro board with 384megs of ecc ram that would be in a system mainly used for checking email. Just checking around on ebay, it would be cheaper to get the overdrive upgrades. Even if I found a P3 board with a P3 500+ with it. I dunno if the 66mhz ECC ram would wold work well since the P3 works at 100Mhz FSB.