Dual Xeon Workstation
 

I am thinking of buying a Dell Precision 450 Precision Workstation with dual 2.4Ghz processors. I noticed the Xeon bus speed is still only at 533Mhz.

Does anyone know when the bus speed will go up on the Xeon?

I was looking at the benchmark page on mersenne.org and it is out of date. Does anyone know how the 533Mhz bus Xeon compares to the 800Mhz bus P4 for prime95 and in general?

Thanks,

Rick

There is a benchmark thread here with some numbers...

Basically, if 800 Xeons were available, you would see the same difference as going from a 533 to a 800 P4...

I'd have a hard time justifying the cost of a system like that, unless I had work which required it...

You can build your own much cheaper of course... Nomadicus could give you some quotes as he just built one for his son with an Asus motherboard...

I don't think Intel has even announced support for anything faster than 533 FSB on the Xeons - there has been a lot of talk about 800, but no movement yet.

The *possibility* certainly exists, though - the "P4 Special Edition" thing is nothing more than a repackaged Xeon, per a lot of reports - and Intel *could* put out such a Xeon quite quickly, once they get the MB chipset support built for it.

I suspect they're dragging their heels deliberately, though, as they don't want the Xeon to eat into Itanium sales....

It is just that - a xeon in retail clothing. Intel won't move fast with it because the xeon market is one where mistakes can't be tolerated, unlike the home sector ... cumine 1.13 ...

I saw a Dell server, xeon boart with 1 cpu, and 10krpm SCSI, for 1200 pesos. Add a second cpu for less tha 400 more ... my last two boxes are faster (6 total GHz) but cost nearly the same. With the Dell pro product support is included, three years worth.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Xyzzy [/i]

I'd have a hard time justifying the cost of a system like that, unless I had work which required it...

You can build your own much cheaper of course... Nomadicus could give you some quotes as he just built one for his son with an Asus motherboard... [/QUOTE]

why not buy a uniprocessor or dual AMD Opteron workstation?:banana:

It should be mentioned that LL testing with 2 clients on dual Xeons will be slower than on separate computers because of memory bus contention.

We had Prime95 running on 2 x 2 Xeon nodes and got notable slowdowns of LL testing. But it will still be faster than running on a single CPU :wink:

A slow down yes. But nothing unexpected. The kid rarely, if ever, plays a game on it. So overall throughput is [I]better[/I] then I expected (programming work excluded). :coffee:
Saw a quad board the other day . . . :no:

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by nomadicus [/i]
[B]Saw a quad board the other day . . . :no: [/B][/QUOTE]
As much as I love quads, having 4 copies of Prime95 running causes all copies to slow down to ~50% speed. My quad Xeon 450 will finish 4 double checks in the same time as my 450MHz laptop can complete 2 double checks! (Granted the quad probably has ~15% utilization for mail and small web pages. The laptop has close to 100% for Prime '95 because that's the only thing it's used for :grin: )

Re: Dual Xeon Workstation
 

[QUOTE][I]Originally posted by RickC [/I]
[B]I am thinking of buying a Dell Precision 450 Precision Workstation with dual 2.4Ghz processors. I noticed the Xeon bus speed is still only at 533Mhz.

Does anyone know when the bus speed will go up on the Xeon?

I was looking at the benchmark page on mersenne.org and it is out of date. Does anyone know how the 533Mhz bus Xeon compares to the 800Mhz bus P4 for prime95 and in general?

Thanks,

Rick [/B][/QUOTE]I run 3 dell duel xeon's 2 with 2.8's 1 with 2.4's. on the 2.4's with 2 prime95's doing LL's i get .086 per itteration on each running a 10 million digit number. with one running an LL I get .077. I get the same .077 if I run a factor while running an LL.
Hope that helps. By the way I run 1600sc servers. I bought 4 of them i was able to get them with 1 2.8 in ea for $630 delivered. I stripped the processors out of 2 of the boxes and made 2 duel 2.8's. Then I bought 2 2.4's retail boxed(3year warrenty)for $460. so I have 3 duel dells for $2960 and a fourth box just waiting for the processors.:cool: I did it that way because at the time retail boxed 2.8's were going for over $500 by themselves....

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by PageFault [/i]
[B]... cumine 1.13 ... [/B][/QUOTE]

*wince*

I skipped the FC-PGA Intel generation - so I got to miss out on both that disaster and the earlier "original" 1Ghz P-III disaster....

8-)


Unfortunately, I DO remember the P90 (P75 and P100 also, IIRC) FPU disaster - and owned one of the affected chips. Didn't do much FP work at the time, though, so it didn't cause me enough problems to ever trade that CPU in.

I just built a dual Xenon using the Asus PC-DL Deluxe board and it runs quite well. I have two 2.4G processors with 533MHz bus, and 1G of DDR333 memory set up as dual channel. Nice and stable and I run two LL instances. See my benchmarks here:[url]http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=59&perpage=25&pagenumber=4[/url] .
I should note that this benchmark is with the second processor running a 33M LL test, so the benchmark is quite nice. Actually the benchmark is about the same if i only run one instance of Prime95.
I went dual Xenon's because as I priced out a dual Athlon 2800+ MP system it would have cost me about the same. Since I already had a dual MP system running my server I thought I'd like to try a dual Xenon.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by delta_t [/i]
[B] I have two 2.4G processors with 533MHz bus, and 1G of DDR333 memory set up as dual channel.

Actually the benchmark is about the same if i only run one instance of Prime95.
[/B][/QUOTE]

Hi Delta_t I was wondering if the the timings of running 1 LL verse 2 LL's is consistant. I'm wondering if its your duel channel memory thats allowing you to have the same timings where as mine vary 10-15% running 1 verses 2 LL's. My board doesn't have the duel channel... I think it might be time to rip out the dell boards. Also you said you did a small oc does the board you used allow you to change the fsb to increase the speed. it looks like if I change the boards so the i can bump the speed only about 5% and with the duel channel memory i might be able to squeeze a 20% increase out of my boxes. based on your timing of .070 for 1792fft over my .086

Thanks for all the replies.

Dell has $400 off a Precision 450 and $500 off a Precision 650.

I really like the idea of having two processors in one box rather than an extra machine to deal with. I also like having ECC memory.

The thing that's bugging me is the 533Mhz bus. If I buy one the 800Mhz might come out. I guess there's no way to know when.

I'm buying a machine to be my main personal machine but I like to keep Prime95 in consideration when buying. I've never been an overclocker so I don't care if the dell can do that.

Rick

Hello lpmurray,

Yes actually, the timings are consistent. Using the Affinity setting I set one to CPU0 the other to CPU1. I'll run one LL test on one CPU and the benchmark on the other and the values are the same regardless of which CPU is running the LL test.

It's a very interesting board because it uses the Intel 875P chipset. The ability to overclock is limited to the FSB. However I need to note that there is no PCI/AGP lock so you could only overclock so far. I think the processors could handle it, but in my case it was my PCI SCSI card that couldn't handle the higher speeds on the PCI bus. I have mine at a FSB of 140 instead of the usual 133. Not much of a OC, but since this is my main workstation I need this to be ultra-stable so I haven't tried pushing it much further. Another note, if you use serial ATA hard drives, all overclocking is automatically disabled.

Here may be an interesting benchmark. Because these are HT processors I wanted to see what slow down running something on the virtual processor would do to the main LL tests. Here's the scenario. One LL-test (33M range) on CPU1 (real). One trial factoring (10M range) on CPU2 (virtual). Then the benchmark on CPU0 (other real). Results are below.

Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
CPU speed: 2525.71 MHz
CPU features: RDTSC, CMOV, PREFETCH, MMX, SSE, SSE2
L1 cache size: 8 KB
L2 cache size: 512 KB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 128 bytes
TLBS: 64
Prime95 version 23.7, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 384K FFT length: 19.738 ms.
Best time for 448K FFT length: 23.529 ms.
Best time for 512K FFT length: 26.581 ms.
Best time for 640K FFT length: 31.619 ms.
Best time for 768K FFT length: 38.587 ms.
Best time for 896K FFT length: 46.073 ms.
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 51.387 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 67.707 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 82.960 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 99.243 ms.
Best time for 2048K FFT length: 111.275 ms.

cost of ownership
 

I would also think that a dual CPU machine would cost less to run (electricity cost and time performing software updates) than two single CPU machines.

Does anyone happen to know this kind of stuff?

Thanks