Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
From: Delaware, USA
Quote:Andreas_Wolf wrote:
> the memory benchmarks I've seen are no faster than my
> PC133 equipped Quicksilver.
I take it you refer to the
RAGEMEM benchmark results ("RAM" section). Could you please provide your Quicksilver results here?
> Overall, there's not much difference between this board and the
> P2020 Freescale board Andreas and I discussed (except the
> Freescale board is only $595 with a hard drive pre-loaded with Linux).
I think now you're being unfair towards the Sam460ex. In my opinion it has some features which surely make for an advantage over Freescale's P2020RDB from an end-user's point of view:
* one PCIe x4 with x16 connector + one PCIe x1 + one PCI (vs. two PCIe x1)
* six USB2 + one USB1.1 (vs. one USB2)
* SATA (vs. none)
* on-board audio (vs. none)
Besides, it seems you're once more confusing the $595 P2020RDB and the $3,500 P2020DS, the latter being the one that comes with an integrated HDD.
> we dismissed the Freescale offering because it had many
> of the faults present in the SAM460EX.
The $595 P2020RDB is to be dismissed because it's in no way suited for the desktop market (see comparison to the Sam460ex above), and as
I told you already in this very thread, the $3,500 P2020DS is to be dismissed because it's just way too expensive for our purposes. Moreover, anything lacking a proper FPU (like the e500v2 core in the P2020) should be dismissed for desktop computing purposes.
None of these points apply to the Sam460ex (the price argument at least not to the same extent), and I never said or implied I'd dismiss "the Freescale offering because it had many of the faults present in the SAM460EX".
Yes, I've repeatedly confused those two boards even though the prices for each are listed in the original document you quoted.
http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/brochure/PWRARCHQIQSG.pdf
But the SAM460EX still only offers a PCIe X16 slot with four lane which would slow down many video cards.
And the processor is fairly slow, even if overclocked by .15Ghz..
As I listed in the CPU/memtest thread, my current 7447A processor produces these numbers:
Write 568 MB/sec. Verify 387 MB/sec
This is with PC133 Memory.
These figures were quoted by Piru on Amiga.org.
SAM460 AMCC460 1.167GHz
Code:
---> RAM <---
READ32: 311 MB/Sec
READ64: 310 MB/Sec
WRITE32: 521 MB/Sec
WRITE64: 521 MB/Sec
WRITE: 1251 MB/Sec (Tricky)
That would seem to indicate that the SAM460EX is slower than some PC133 equipped Powermacs.
And of course there is the lack of AltiVec(although we face that with the first e5500 cored products).
Finally, Piru's comparative benchmarks of distributed.net tasks .
OGR
Sam 460 1.0GHz: 10,124,948 nodes/sec
Pegasos 2 G4 1.0GHz: 20,844,783 nodes/sec
Mac Mini G4 1.5GHz: 31,267,175 nodes/sec
RC5-72
Sam 460 1.0GHz: 3,286,052 keys/sec
Pegasos2 G4 1.0GHz: 10,678,428 keys/sec
Mac Mini G4 1.5GHz: 15,701,333 keys/sec
Obviously these are greatly skewed by the presence or lack of AltiVec, but they're still pretty dramatic.
Dave has a point, it offers us no clear advantage over what we already have,. In fact its probably less powerful.
So if a second hand Mac can wipe the floor with this unit, why consider it?
"Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"
