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OK< I was previously a die-hard RC5'er, but RC5 runs like cold dog**** on a P4. I've got this nifty new 2.74GHz monster, and I want to throw it at some distributed mayhem. Does F@H like P4s? Do any of the current distributed computing projects? I'd imagine SETI would like the fat system bandwidth and the big 512K L2, but I was never a really huge fan of alien-hunting....

BTW, for the interested:

Athlon 1700+@1900+ [email protected] = 5.5MKeys/s
P4 [email protected] = 3MKeys/s

I really wish Intel had put in a second or third x87 FPU.

Well, the P4 doesn't do any better at folding either. On the ProtienA series (currently the biggest one) a 2.2GHz P4 would put away a frame in about 15 minutes, my new 1800+ can do it in 8. Maybe the United Devices project would like the P4 better, it is sponsered by Intel after all....

Steel wrote:

Well, the P4 doesn't do any better at folding either. On the ProtienA series (currently the biggest one) a 2.2GHz P4 would put away a frame in about 15 minutes, my new 1800+ can do it in 8. Maybe the United Devices project would like the P4 better, it is sponsered by Intel after all....

The Pentium4 still sucks on the UD client (and just about anything else requiring x87 floating point calculations), but United Devices uses a point system that adjusts your processor performance by the MHz of the processor. Therefore, if you have a very inefficient CPU, you score lots of points, even though you get less work done. I had an old Pentium-166MMX working on UD for a while, and I was getting more points per day than folks with a 1GHz Athlon, even though they were doing many more work units per day than the Pentium was.

Steel wrote:

Well, the P4 doesn't do any better at folding either. On the ProtienA series (currently the biggest one) a 2.2GHz P4 would put away a frame in about 15 minutes, my new 1800+ can do it in 8. Maybe the United Devices project would like the P4 better, it is sponsered by Intel after all....

Doh! I was a bit off in times for the P4. The 2GHz P4 I've got going now does a frame on the ProtienA series in about 13.5 minutes so that 2.74GHz monster should put away a frame in about the same time as an AthlonXP 1800+ .

There's a couple of links I've come across that you may find useful -

http://jaffafamily.org/~distcomp/bestmachine.html
http://www.geocities.com/sw_perf/

First is bit complicated to look at but informative. The short version though is the P4's not really much good at most of the distributed computing projects, main exception being SETI where it's between that and the Palomino (fastest of each breaking 3 hours). The only project that sees the P4 do massively well is in prime95.

Steel wrote:

Doh! I was a bit off in times for the P4. The 2GHz P4 I've got going now does a frame on the ProtienA series in about 13.5 minutes so that 2.74GHz monster should put away a frame in about the same time as an AthlonXP 1800+ .

The "forumula" that I have is that a P4 is equal to a 1.1GHz slower athlon in folding. So, that 2GHz monster is equal to a 900MHz Athlon/Duron. Whodathunkit?

My TBird@1GHz will do a ProteinA series protein in 12:12. The Slot A 850 that I have runs a ProteinA in about 14 minutes a frame. So, based on those times, I would venture to say that its true.

In short, Forge, make that 2GHz P4 your gaming/TR-browsing/MP3/whatever box.. since gaming seems to be one of the consistently few things that its good at.

Fortunately, however, they're starting to put out Workunits with a new core attached to them - a core that has SSE and 3DNow! support.

.:Ttocs