[ale] Pentium Pro vs. Pentium II

[Jason Boyles]

>> >         The Ppro has been discontinued, so maybe you can find it
>> cheap.
>> Is this true?  The Pentium pro has been discontinued?
>No, it's not.  The PPro is still in production, and a new version of the
>chiphas been released recently (a PPro 200MHz with 1MB cache).


    My bad. I understood that the dual cavity production costs were too high
for Andy G. to stomach. It does makes sense for them to stay around for
awhile, since the PII and LX are net yet capable of more than 2 CPU SMP.

    BTW, the PPro with 1MB cache is >$2k.

>The word is, however, that this is the last PPro chip, and the series
>will be retired in the next few years.

    Ah, that's where I got the idea it was no more.

>FWIW, I find the PPro to be a wonderful performer.  It is, MHz-per-MHz,
>a better performer than the PII on most jobs I've tried.


    Yeah, PPro cache is faster. Viva locality of reference!

    How overclockable is the PPro?

>And it flat runs the hell out of Linux.


    Indeed.

    I ran SMP Linux on a 4 CPU PPro 200 box with an Intel 82557 PCI ethernet
card and 256MB of RAM for awhile.
The adjective that comes to mind is "superluminal".


-----
Jason Boyles <jason at alltel.net>