Subject: The best CPU

From: Massimo Ottonelli <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 09:50:51 -0400

Dear ccler,

 I would like to thank everyone for the responses to my inquiry
concerning the  comparison the ALPHA and RISC-IBM cpu.
A summary of the most interesting answer is included below:

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Just my 2 cents: Consider purchasing one of the new HP workstations
based on the PA-8600 processor (RISC technology). I had the opportunity
of running some gaussian 98 jobs on one of these machines, and their
performance is really impressive!
You can also visit the following addresses:

 http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/tms/abinitio/cover.html
 http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/tms/abinitio-v4/cover.html

You will find there useful information about the relative performance of

several recent models of workstations from several manufacturers.
Regards.

Jose I. Garcia
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. Jose Ignacio Garcia-Laureiro
Depto. Quimica Organica. Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Aragon
Facultad de Ciencias (edificio D). Universidad de Zaragoza-CSIC
c/ Pedro Cerbuna, 12. E-50009 Zaragoza (Spain)
Phone: +34 976762271       e-mail: [email-masked]
Fax:   +34 976762077
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Martyn Guest at Daresbury Laboratory has been benchmarking a variety of
machines
over the years. His benchmarks are explicitly chemistry oriented. What I

understood from his most recent information is that the Compaq (formerly
DEC)
Alpha processors currently offer the best performance. For more details
I refer to
his material published at

    http://www.cse.dl.ac.uk/Activity/DISCO+921

and the links therein.

Huub

========================================================================

Huub van Dam                               E-mail: [email-masked]

CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory                  phone: +44-1925-603362
Daresbury, Warrington                         fax: +44-1925-603634
Cheshire, UK
WA4 4AD

========================================================================

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The Alpha is a RISC CPU.  What other RISC CPU did you mean?

The Alpha will have excellent performance on QC apps, as will
other RISC CPUs which have high floating point and memory bandwidth.

Lately high-end Intel and AMD chips have had high performance too, but
I think the latest alphas have a specFP95 of something like 60-80 while
the latest Intels are more like 30-40.  Memory bandwidth is another
issue entirely, since it also depends on the backplane bandwidth of the
system.

Dave

Dave