comparing CPU's

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, ted leslie wrote:

> but when i put 9GB ram in it, and a 10K raptor
> and a Nvidia 7900 vid card
> and those additions made way more of a difference then the processor
> upgrade.

Absolutely.  I/O (whether it be disk, memory or whatever) is almost always 
the bottleneck in a modern system.  Unless you're in one of a small number 
of specialised fields CPU speed is rarely the limiting factor.

Unfortunately CPU manufacturers and the IT industry as a whole have 
convinced most lay-people that a faster CPU is the solution to most 
problems.  We're seeing smiliar misinformation at the moment with respect 
to dual core CPUs.  Most users really can get by on a single core without 
any problems.  Sure it is nice to have dual core but I wouldn't shell out 
any $$$ unless you've determined CPU performance really is your 
bottleneck[1].

A related issue is memory usage.  Modern OSes do not just use memory to 
run apps.  Less experienced GTALUGers may want to open a shell on their 
Linux box and run free.  Checkout how the system is allocating memory.  In 
a system with lots of RAM you will probably find a large disk cache in use 
- this goes a long way to improving the overall performance of the system.

[1] and I mean through proper profiling :)

Rob

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