Hi, I'm by no means a hardware expert, so please be
gentle...

I'm sure many of us have browsed 
http://www.haveland.com/index.htm?povbench/index.php
and seen the (to me) astonishing 00:07:34 for a single
Pentium Xeon on a Dell Precision 450 running Lunar Linux.
By comparison my old Pentium III coppermine running
SuSE 8.2 and a gcc-optimized PovRay 3.50c took 02:12:59.

Anyway I thought "I gotta get one of those" and forked
out for a brand new box (bespoke built) with 2 P4 Xeons
and 4Gb of core memory, and put Lunar on it.

Generally I'm extremely pleased with it, but dissappointingly
my benchmark (pov 3.6.1 this time) comes nowhere close.
With a gcc optimized build I measured 00:35:30 and after
getting hold of the Intel Compiler and rebuilding with that
I got it down to 00:30:28.

here's some of my /proc/cpuinfo

billh@Tarragon ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 2
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz
stepping        : 9
cpu MHz         : 3056.924
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca 
cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips        : 6029.31

... x4

I'm happy enough with my vast improvement, but when the
time comes to upgrade I'd like to know what I really should
have bought -- though I now suspect I couldn't have afforded
it :-)

Any comments?


-- 
Bill Hails
http://thyme.homelinux.net/

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