The Register schrijft dat ze de oplossing hebben van het Pentium III mysterie, waarom de Katmai op 500 mhz sneller is dan de coppermine op 700 mhz. Dat is heel verrassend *kuch* te danken aan de dubbele hoeveelheid cache op de katmai core. Je kan dus beter een Katmai op 500 Mhz kopen dan een Coppermine op 700 Mhz als je meedoet aan Seti@home (doet natuurlijk niemand, iedereen doet hier mee met de DPC):
When we revealed that a 700MHz Coppermine performed worse than a 500MHz Katmai when running SETI at home analysis (Story: Pentium III defies the laws of physics), we were at a loss initially to explain how this could be. But Register readers came to the rescue and supplied an answer that in retrospect is so obvious that we should have spotted it ourselves. Thanks to everyone who wrote in.
[...] "Under Linux, the SETI@Home client uses about 13Mb of memory, so the overall memory isn't an important thing. The key, however, is the size of the cache. The data for a Seti work unit is about 350K, so the difference between smaller and larger caces is huge due to the poorly optimised FFT (fast fourier transform) that eats up most of the CPU time. For instance, A PII 350 is twice as fast as a Celeron 466.