Bill wrote:

Tony Sivori wrote:

I've only crunched a few work units on the 466, but it is averaging 14
hours per work unit. Considering the Celeron has only 71% of the clock
speed of the 650, has half the cache, runs on a 66 MHz front side bus,
and is based on the PII, I was expecting it to take a lot longer.

I'm not surprised at the performance.

The P3 is not really a faster processor than the P2 except for clock
speed, cache, and SSE. Internally, the two cores are very similar. If
you set the P3 to run at 466MHz, I'm sure the floating point crunching
times would be very close.

I thought cache and memory speed was important to seti. The PIII has
double the cache, and a 33% faster memory bus compared to the Celeron.

I don't know if you remember, but the P3 clock speeds more or less took
over where the P2 left off (about 450MHz I think). The P4 was basically
the same, giving us more power by ramping up the clock speed at the
core, allowing the better buffering system to pump data faster.

Right, I remember that from when the P4 was introduced. Clock for clock,
the PIII was slightly faster than the P4 for most applications. If memory
serves, for that reason Intel actually canceled plans to have overlapping
PIII and P4 cpu speeds. The benchmarks would have been too embarrassing.

Of course other factors improve overall performance as well, such as
faster memory, faster buses, faster HDD interfaces, and faster video
cards. And that's why I generally don't upgrade until I can get at least
a doubling in performance. I don't find it satisfying to buy a new
computer that "feels" a little faster, I want one that is noticeably
faster.

Same here. My last upgrade (to a 2.4 GHz P4) was a forced one, due to my
PIII mainboard blowing out a few capacitors. In fact, if it weren't for
seti I'd probably be one of those relatively rare users who take an almost
perverse pleasure in using the oldest (and slowest) hardware possible.

-- 
Tony Sivori