f/f george wrote:

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?

[...]

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

[...]

... And hence Celerons and Durons are crippled performance wise (and still vastly too powerful for just web and email use).


For 'scientific' applications, native 64-bits operations should win. However, for the present 'real-world', a large cache with a good FPU likely gives the best overall performance.

My opinion is that AMD still has the better CPU architechture and a lead over Intel IA64. AMD also usually offer better price/performance ratio.

So, for your money, I guess that the large cache 64-bit AMDs will give you the best compromise for present and future crunching.

However, if you are going to stay only with s@h, note that their present algorithms are very much 32-bit or less so perhaps you should just go with a top-end Barton core Athlon.


Good luck,
Martin