RE: How are CPU Speed and Overall CPW Related? -- MIDRANGE-L

All kinds of things are priced the same way.  It's called capitalism - you 
charge what the market will bear.  For example, backup tapes are basically 
priced based on capacity.  It certainly doesn't cost almost 10 times as 
much to produce a 25GB QIC tape than it does a 2.5GB QIC tape.  Yes the 
tape formulation is a little different, and there's usually (but not 
always) more tape in a higher capacity cartridge, the cost of the tape 
itself is fairly insignificant.  All the other parts in a QIC cartridge 
are basically the same.

...Neil





Jim Damato <jdamato@dollargeneral.com>
Sent by: owner-midrange-l@midrange.com
2001/05/04 18:50
Please respond to MIDRANGE-L

 
        To:     "'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com'" <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
        cc: 
        Subject:        RE: How are CPU Speed and Overall CPW Related?


Back when I bought my Dell desktop Pentium 3 PC there were options for
450MHz and 550MHz processors.  You're saying that the distinction between
them is somewhat arbitrary.  When they upcharge by a few hundred bucks for
the 550MHz they're really just licensing you to use a faster clock speed.
It's not like there's a tangible hardware difference in the faster system
that should make it cost more.  Both have the same cache.  Memory and
add-ons are priced separately.  We just get charged to unlock greater
potential in the CPU.

The light just went on over my head.  Gee, I don't know why I never 
thought
of it that way.  Now some of this discussion seems less like we're
uncovering "a malicious act of evil IBM".

I don't think I'll ever get over the Interactive Feature and bumble bee
server stuff though.

Much thanks...

James Damato
Manager - Technical Administration
Dollar General Corporation
(615) 855-4375
jdamato@dollargeneral.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Westdorp, Tom [mailto:Tom.Westdorp@StationCasinos.com]
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 3:41 PM
To: 'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com '
Subject: RE: How are CPU Speed and Overall CPW Related?



>I am not constantly denying that CPU is constrained. I am constantly
>denying your explicit or implicit statement that this is a malicious act
>of
>evil IBM - that this is something that good guys PC manufacturers do not
>do, and bad guys in IBM constantly do.

PC makers don't do that, nah.  Will all the oveclockers please raise your
hands?  And all those that can't overclock because Intel locked the chip
down?

All computer manufacturers step their processors to meet price points, and
most now do it artificially to improve their mass production efficiencies.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alexei Pytel
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Sent: 5/4/01 1:01 PM
Subject: Re: How are CPU Speed and Overall CPW Related?


>>  May I dare remind you that you are constantly leaving hardware out
of
the
>>  scope of this discussion?  Were you using a 170-2290?  What AS/400
and
PC
>>  were you comparing?  You are, in effect, contantly denying that the
CPU
on
>>  the low-end 170 models is constrained by something.  Whatever the
constraint
>>  is, is aparently only known by IBM.

I am not constantly denying that CPU is constrained. I am constantly
denying your explicit or implicit statement that this is a malicious act
of
evil IBM - that this is something that good guys PC manufacturers do not
do, and bad guys in IBM constantly do.

Of course, CPU IS contsrained - it is ALWAYS constrained by something -
CPU
technology is so much ahead of memory technology, I/O technology, disk
drive technology. The problem is how to keep CPU busy, not how to make
it
run faster.
I have seen somewhere results of investigation, that in normal desktop
workload CPU on PCs is waiting for memory accesses more than 95% of the
time. So it does not really matter, how fast CPU is. CPU is working in
short bursts. The speed of this burst is important for graphical
rendering,
for some special-purpose applications, for your test, for games...
But in a real world memory bus throughput, I/O bandwidth etc are much
more
important.
Just recently I got new PC with 4 times memory, 3 times CPU Mhz and 4
times
disk. One would expect that it will fly in comparison to an old one. Not
exactly - it's about 20%-30% faster for the things I normally do.
Although I have no doubts that test like yours will show that it just
screams.

But I am digressing...

What I was going to say is that CPU performance is constrained by a
speed
of many other components in a  system.
What you are saying is that IBM puts special fences to slow down CPU.
What I am saying is that IBM installs the same CPU chip in different
models
with different componentry - cache, memory, bus... This different
componentry (which has diifferent cost!) will define an effective speed
of
a particular model. Which is what you see in your results.
By the way, PC manufacturers also do this. The same Pentium chips are
installed in desktop models and high-end servers - which have larger
cache,
separate and faster memory bus etc. And the same benchmark will run
faster
on high-end servers, although Mhz rate is the same.

Your observations are correct - your conclusions are not.

    Alexei Pytel





                    "Nathan M. Andelin"

                    <nathanma@haaga.com       To:
<MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
                    >                         cc:

                    Sent by:                  Subject:     Re: How are
CPU Speed and Overall CPW
                    owner-midrange-l@mi        Related?

                    drange.com





                    05/04/2001 01:43 PM

                    Please respond to

                    MIDRANGE-L








> Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 10:45:46 -0500
> From: "Alexei Pytel" <pytel@us.ibm.com>
> Subject: Re: How are CPU Speed and Overall CPW Related?
>
> 1. There are very few purely interpretive languages today. They all
> precompile the source to some internal form, which is really very
close
to
> compile. Which is especially true in your test, where you have very
short
> loop. Do you really think that FoxPro interprets every statement in
your
> loop as it is encountered ?

Yes, Foxpro intreprets every statement.  But the bulk of the work is in
the
alltrim() function, which is simply a wrapper around a compiled C
function.
Which is why I considered it to be a valid test.  The effect of
interpretation by Foxpro was evidenced by the Delpi example, which ran
nearly twice as fast as Foxpro, and ten times as fast as the RPG
equivalent.


> 2. I want to attract once again your attention to the fact that you
trim
> *constant string* every time. Smart compiler will eliminate your
entire
> loop and replace it with a single statement. Change number of
repetitions
> from 500000 to 5000000. I will not be surprised if the timing will be
> exactly the same.

Ok, I changed the loop to 5,000,000.  It took ten times longer to run,
contrary to what you expected.  The string passed to the alltrim()
function
is a variable - not a constant.  It holds 50 bytes, just like the RPG
variable.

> 3. I dare remind you that you constantly leave software out of the
scope
of
> this discussion.
> You want to compare PowerPC speed to Pentium speed. But what you do
> actually compare is speed of RPG implementation in OS/400 environment
on
> PowerPC to speed of FoxPro implementation in Windows environment on
> Pentium. Which is somewhat different thing, don't you think ?

The efficiency of code is in RPG's favor, not Foxpro's.  Yet Foxpro was
more
than 5 times faster.  And Delphi was 10 times faster.  That's too much
of a
difference to be explained by code efficiency.


> Try some other programming languages on OS/400 for a better
perspective.
> Try C/C++ instead of RPG.
> Several years ago when RISC was first out I took some standard LinPack
> numerical benchmarks (they are all in C and with some massaging can be
> easily ported to OS/400) and ran them on PC and OS/400. Results were
quite
> comparable.

May I dare remind you that you are constantly leaving hardware out of
the
scope of this discussion?  Were you using a 170-2290?  What AS/400 and
PC
were you comparing?  You are, in effect, contantly denying that the CPU
on
the low-end 170 models is constrained by something.  Whatever the
constraint
is, is aparently only known by IBM.

We did some language comparisons a month or so ago.  It was a string
handling exercise.  Following was the result.  I think the RPG examples
in
these tests would have been faster if the numeric variable woulds have
been
defined as integers, rather than zoned numerics.  Notice how I used
integers
in my more recent tests.


===============  MI === RPG ===  C === Java
Right Adjust String:   1.3        2.6          1.5        18.7
Embedded spaces:  2.4        3.2          2.0        35.8
Code by: ========= leif ==  buck == phil === phil ===





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