From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 6 Aug 2001 19:05:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 6 Aug 2001 19:05:24 -0400 Received: from zeus.kernel.org ([209.10.41.242]:42215 "EHLO zeus.kernel.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 6 Aug 2001 19:05:07 -0400 Message-ID: <3B6F14E2.3030209@ftel.co.uk> Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 23:06:26 +0100 From: Paul Flinders User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010725 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: SIS 630E perf problems? In-Reply-To: <200108061713.f76HDaj16575@work.bitmover.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: unlisted-recipients:; (no To-header on input)@localhost.localdomain Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Larry McVoy wrote: >I use bookpcs - all in one, really nice form factor - for build machines, >firewalls (with a USB ethernet), etc. I used the first generation which >had intel i810 graphics (sucked) but had fairly typical performance, >competitive for kernel builds with other current platforms at the time. > >I recently bought a couple of the second generation of these boxes, these >have an SIS 630E based motherboard. This has a much better graphics interface, >quite reasonable at 1280x1024, and all the other bits work fine under RH 7.1 >without tweaking. > >Performance sucks, however. I did an LMbench run to try and figure out why >and it's obvious - the memory latencies are 430 ns - that's 2x more than >what is reasonable. I tweaked the various bios settings a bit and could >not get it to change much, maybe 20ns but not the 200ns I was looking for. >The fact that this system is running a celeron with a dinky cache makes it >feel really slow. These boxes with a 633Mhz celeron feel slower than the >old boxes with a 400Mhz celeron. > If there is a problem it appears to be OS, and even processor independent. I have one of these and had made essentially the same observation as Larry - that memory bandwidth seems extremely poor. Larry's mail prompted me to have another look so I installed Win 2k and ran the Sandra benchmarks - which came up with a memory bandwidth of 130MB/s, about 1/3 of it's reference value for a SiS 630S. Disk throughput was poor as well, about 8MB/s for a 10G 5400 Seagate running in Ultra DMA 66. Presumably this is secondary to the lousy memory bandwidth and (?) points to a bottleneck between chipset & RAM Mine has a 667Mhz Citrix (Samual I core) and normally runs RH 7.1, Does anybody else have one?