Topic: PIII Vs Celeron

[Alec Norek]

Does anybody know if e-smith (Linux) would benefit from a P3 CPU vs. a celeron of the same MHz. Just thinking of the cost saving if the OS doesn't appreciate it.

[Des Dougan]

e-smith will work perfectly well on either. It really depends how much you want to spend. If budgets are tight, I'd be more inclined to go with a lower-cost CPU and add as much RAM as could be afforded.

Des Dougan

[Engelmann]

YES - RAM is much more important than the cpu speed! WHAT ABOUT A AMD DURON - much faster and cheaper! works great!

[Clifford Ilkay]

The only place where you would benefit from having a P3 vs. a Celeron is if you were running applications that would benefit from the larger cache and faster bus speed of the P3, such as database applications. There is nothing in e-smith that is that CPU intensive. I would spend more money on disk subsystems than on memory or CPU. You will notice the difference between a fast SCSI drive and a fast IDE drive, particularly if you have disk contention caused by multiple processes doing read and writes simultaneously.

Regards,

Clifford

[Alejandro]

Alec, Engelmann, Des & Clifford
With your excuse, I'll partially disagree with the answers on this thread,
It all depends on wich process will be done more frequently by e-smith,
In particular, cpu speed is really important if the software makes a heavy cpu load,  not only database apps will do it, in fact many of the functions on a server will require a high cpu speed and the most important, an adecuate size, speed, and bus size of internal cache memory  the transfer rate betwen internal cache and cpu is in fact the most relevant factor to see difference between 2 processors at same speed.
I agree partially with the need of adecuate amount of RAM but if the processor is slow, you would not get any beneffits adding ram,
And a good disk could be a good choice to large file or database management.

Which will really decide wich of all factor is most important for e-smith to run better is the usage you will give to your box,
and of course an authorized opinion on this subject will told us what is most important acording to the software development,

In the hardware requirements you can see and analize what could be more important acording to the services you will plan to offer.
CU
Alejandro

[Clifford Ilkay]

Hi Alejandro,

We were not talking about CPUs of different clock rate. The question was, what, if any, difference would a Celeron and a P3 at the *same* clock rate make? Since both CPUs use the same core, the differences are one of L2 cache size and speed, MMX instructions, and front side bus clock, and of course, price. None of these factors are likely to be a bottleneck in the average e-smith server unless one is running Oracle or some such DBMS which could benefit from a larger L2 cache and faster FSB. MMX is irrelevant since a server is not going to be running MMX enhanced games. qmail is gentle on resources and I doubt it would benefit from a larger L2 cache. Cache is a mixed story anyway. The Celeron's L2 cache is only 128K but runs at CPU clock. The Katmai P3 has 512K of L2 cache at half CPU clock and the Coppermine P3 has 256K of on-die cache at full CPU clock. Chances are, Alek was comparing Celeron to Katmai not Celeron to Coppermine. So, that leaves us with the question of "Which is better, X cache at full clock or 4X cache at half clock?" The answer is, "It depends." There are very apps that would benefit from the larger L2 cache and most e-smith users are not running them and those that are would not be asking this question since the price difference between the Celeron and P3 would be negligible compared to the overall cost of the system.

Until recently, one of our clients was running Mandrake 5.2 as a file server and gateway machine, servicing 20 users on a Celeron 300A CPU with 64M of RAM. The server was quite responsive because I had them spend their money on 10k rpm U2W SCSI drives instead of on a faster CPU or more RAM. CPU utilization rarely exceeded 1% on that machine and it never hit swap. Installing a faster CPU or more RAM would not have mattered.

Regards,

Clifford