On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 01:17:03 -0400, "Darren Eveland" <develand@ody.ca>
wrote:

I am wondering what CPU to get for Seti@home (BOINC)? The choices are:

Amd Athlon 64 (socket 949 version)  - Athlon FX version with more cache or
normal Athlon 64 version

OR

Intel Pentium 4 EE edition...

Which CPU is better? How much memory does Seti's algorithms take to run and
can it run entirely in the CPU's cache? (eg 1 meg for Athlon 64 FX) or 2 meg
for Pentium 4 EE ?

Does anyone know any web pages that have benchmarks with BOINC?

Thanks,
Darren

Welllll....Seti Classic will run in 512k of L2 cache but will NOT run
in 256k of L2 cache. Meaning that the Celeron machines or any machine
with less than 512k of L2 cache will NOT run the client in memory. I
have one machine that has 1 meg of L2 cache and it will run 2 clients
at the same time, both in memory. I would assume with 2 meg you could
run 4 of the Classic units at the same time.
Boinc is a whole other ball of wax. Some of the Boinc workunits will
REQUIRE 512k some more some will not require any. As Boinc winds up
into normalcy the scheduler will be better tuned and the program will
be set to accurately determine your cache size and you will be given
some units based on what the Scientists are looking for. The
Scientists have ideas for things to look for but they take a very long
time without a lot of cached memory. Not everyone will be able to do
these memory intensive units.
The web page www.tomshardware.com did some tests on Seti Classic so I
would expect them to do tests on Boinc as well. Currently a search
their comes back with nothing found.