Shouldn't this be faster?

[conjur]

An Athlon 850 (o/c to 892) with PC100 RAM doing SETI WUs in about 9.5 hrs? Shouldn't that be quicker??

Oh, and hey! Look at this:


Name (and URL) Conjur
Results Received 2221
Total CPU Time 2.221 years

 

[minendo]

My athlon 900 (slot a) took about 9 hours. That was with 512mb Cas 2 micron memory.

 

[Fingers]

I have a 950 with pc133 doing them in 8.75 hours, so it looks pretty good to me.

 

[conjur]

hmmm...it is a slot A, too. I just figured it would be quicker since the Athlon is quicker than a likewise clocked Pentium and I've some PIII 933 running at about 7hrs (but with PC133 RAM)

 

[Fingers]

If that was on the good old BX chipset then thats why. The memory performance of that chipset is just plain incredible. I actually had to take my hat off to intel for when they developed it.

 

[Ken g6]

All my Athlon 800s do WUs in 9.5-10 hours generally. Of course, they're running the statically linked Linux client!

I wonder if OS matters less on Athlons?

 

[Poof]

I wonder if OS matters less on Athlons?

If those were the Athlon "classic", then I think the cache is bigger than the PIII but is only running 2/3 the speed of the core or something? If that's the case, the Intel would still kick because although the cache is smaller, it's running full core speed, and the 3.x client was sortof modified to take into account the smaller cache. Thus, the T-birds, which have a core-speed cache similar to the PIII, helps immensely.

Also, IIRC, Roelof Engelbrecht had some charts looking at SETI performance and CpF on different CPUs and I think there was more of a variability of times for same-AR WUs than with the Intels. You might want to check out his website for some interesting analyses (scroll down).

 

[EvilWobbles]

Strange, I have a Duron 650 oc slightly to 680. I just checked my SetiQ logs and it's average WU time is 8.5 hrs. I do have PC133 memory in the system though. I was surprised to see a Duron clocked that low doing WUs faster than some regular old Athlons!

 

[conjur]

Thanks, Poof!

This particular box is an Athlon 850 purchased in about June of 2000 (just when the 1.0GHz were first coming out, I believe). The m/b is a Jetway 771AS and I think it takes up to 1.2GHz so I may look to switch to that chip as I'm sure they're pretty cheap (if I can find one - slot A - for the 200MHz FSB and not the 266MHz, that is) Did AMD even make Slot A cpus that fast? May just swap that whole m/b for, say, an old A7V133 or something.