gooley@sunb4 (Markian "Party Mineral" Gooley) (08/24/90)
Suppose that you wanted to put together a fast 386 or 486 machine for running Unix (okay, this is kinda oxymoronic). How much faster is a 486 machine than a 386 of the same clock speed? Assume not too much floating point. Is an EISA bus worth the extra money, or are most peripherals (e.g. disk controllers and, heck, disks) too slow to profit by it. Mark. gooley@sunb4.cs.uiuc.edu
flint@gistdev.gist.com (Flint Pellett) (08/28/90)
gooley@sunb4 (Markian "Party Mineral" Gooley) writes: >Suppose that you wanted to put together a fast 386 or 486 machine for >running Unix (okay, this is kinda oxymoronic). How much faster is >a 486 machine than a 386 of the same clock speed? Assume not too >much floating point. Is an EISA bus worth the extra money, or are >most peripherals (e.g. disk controllers and, heck, disks) too slow >to profit by it. >Mark. >gooley@sunb4.cs.uiuc.edu Which to get all depends on your budget. The 486 is around 2.5 times faster at the same clock speed, maybe a bit more, on integer arithmetic. If you can afford a 486, get it, even for integer work. (The 486 really wins if you want to do floating (IMO), because you don't have to spend an extra $500 on a 387 chip: the cost of the 486 ends up near the same for 25 MHz 486 vs. 33 MHz 386 + 387 with the 486 performing 1.8 times faster.) I can't tell that the EISA is worth the money right now, since it seems to be the case that the EISA boxes all cost an extra $2-3K+ more than ISA boxes you can get that are otherwise the same. If you're buying the machine for use at home, EISA doesn't buy enough extra performance right now to justify the cost-- look for one of the machines that does bus-mastering on the ISA bus instead. -- Flint Pellett, Global Information Systems Technology, Inc. 1800 Woodfield Drive, Savoy, IL 61874 (217) 352-1165 uunet!gistdev!flint or flint@gistdev.gist.com