BUH Blog

AMD or Intel - Still debating

Administrator — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:05:46 +0000

I was really looking forward to the release of the Core 2 Duo chips from Intel a couple of months back. I am in a desperate need of a new computer - at least I would lead you to believe that! Honestly, the little computer that I use - 4 years old and running and Intel Pentium 4 at 2.2Ghz - works. It works. Yes, it is slow at times - especially when dealing with Microsoft Outlook. Yes, yes - I know - I should be trying other email clients, but have never gotten around to it. Probably the bottleneck is the hard drive. My machine is running a standard IDE drive - all 80 Gigs of it. A SATA drive would probably help a lot.

Now, back to the processor choice. My system runs slowly when I am trying to do certain things - at those times I dream about the newest processors and their ability (the dual core processors) to handle multi-tasking a bit better. Over the summer I was certain about getting an AMD X2 3800 - it had a wonderful price to performance ratio - it was the cheapest of the AMD X2 (dual core) processors and at $300 it was well priced. Here it is three months later and I STILL don’t have a new computer.

The biggest reason for this - my computer still works! It is slow - but works. And the dang Core 2 Duo got me all excited, so that froze me for a while. Then AMD dropped the prices of all their X2 line 50%! Now we are getting closer to the Xmas season and things will really get interesting in the processor world, but I would say the odds are 50:50 that I am still using the my old computer come Jan first of 2007…

100 Gigaflops in the PS3?

Administrator — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:12:58 +0000

I was pretty aware that the Cell processor (yeah - could they have found a more generic name?) from IBM was a major advance in CPU design and performance, but had no idea it was going to be at the 100 Gigaflops level. I just read that Folding@home, has announced plans to launch a service on the upcoming Sony Playstation 3. First - you have to understand that the Cell processor is going to be used in the next generation Sony Playstation - the PS3 - to be released in Nov of 2006. Next - that Folding@home is a project to study protein folding by distributing the problem across thousands of machines. Thirdly - a fast AMD Opteron processor can do about 8 to 10 gigaflops - that is 8 to 10 billion double-precision floating-point operations per second. In the article they mention that ONE PS3 will have the ability to produce 100 Gigaflops - thus equaling about 10 AMD Opterons!

I know IBM is working desktops using this chip, but I wonder if it will be cheaper to convert a PS3 into a Linux box for number crunching…

Wow - even RAID 1 rocks!

Administrator — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:19:55 +0000

One of my other sites - DeepMarket - is data intensive, as it deals with stock market data. But it was running pretty well and I had not been too concerned about performance. Actually, I was more concerned about reliability, so I purchased a STARDOM-2600 from Carday Supply. The SR2600 is a two disk RAID device (both ATA and SATA) with either RAID 0 or RAID 1. The drives are hot-swappable in case of a drive failure in the RAID 1 configuration.

This was my first RAID experience, but not overly excited because the reason I picked up this solution was for the RAID 1 mirroring. I popped my web server drive (a chunky 300 GB SATA) in the top bay of the SR2600, connected it via SATA cable to the web server and booted the machine. No problems. I added a brand new version of the same 300 GB drive into the second bay and immediately the SR2600 started duplicating the first drive to create a mirror. Three hours later I had a RAID 1 setup.

My aim had been stability, mirroring, backup and all that nice stuff - not the fun stuff - performance tuning. But, I was wondering what performance “penalty” I may be paying for a RAID 1 configuration. I pulled the second drive out out (remember - hot swap) while the web server was handling a little traffic. No problem - so we can see the mirror aspect is working nicely. I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth to crawl my site completely and time how long that took with a single drive.

One drive and about 10,000 pages took about 17 minutes to be crawled by Xenu. Interesting. Okay, so I plugged the second drive back in. Oooops! SR2600 rebuilds the second drive from scratch! Okay - good to know and I guess I should have figured that. Why do I have 300 GB drives again?

Three hours later we are back in RAID 1 mirrored configuration again. I run Xenu again. Two drives running at RAID 1 only takes 9 minutes! Coool. I mean, duh. I should have figured that RAID 1 would take advange of the fact that it can read from two independent drives - that the writing process is the one that (might?) suffer a performance hit.

Just to be certain, I re-booted the server to flush any and all caching that MySQL may have done. I re-ran Xenu. This time is was 9 minutes and 15 seconds. Not bad.

Not only do I have have the safety of a RAID 1 drive setup, but I got a nice boost in performance. I recommend the SR2600 for those who feel they need it. It runs between $250 and $300 (no drives).