We’ve just completed an exhaustive test of several Pentium and Athlon
processors, trying to find the fastest combination of components on which to
run our NTW4 software. Our code is carefully written to run entirely in
memory - once we’re loaded into memory, the hard drive is very seldom
accessed and only then by NT’s internal housekeeping. Our code runs as an NT
Service and performs no video operations of any kind, so video bandwidth
shouldn’t be a factor either. Math operations are almost entirely integer,
not FP. Because of these factors, we believe(d) we are limited only by core
and bus speed… and while we don’t expect speed to scale linearly with core
speed, we expected something.
Our testing showed that above 800MHz core speed there doesn’t appear to be
any benefit to faster cores. Going from 800 to 867 to 900 MHz, which
represents a 13% increase in core speed, we see exactly zero delivered
improvement. Going from 450 to 700 to 800, we do see improvements - but they
level off above 800. Changing the external bus speed (from 100 MHz to 133
MHz) also has no measurable effect.
These NTW4 machines are running very lean. Minimal NT Services are running,
and there’s only two cards in the backplane (AGP video and PCI network).
TaskMan reports only 13 processes, most of them NT’s own, and memory
consumption at idle is under 15MB.
Since we’ve factored out the disk and video, what’s left? Any suggestions?
RLH