*BSD News Article 68459


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From: tsingle@sunland.gsfc.nasa.gov (Tim Singletary)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: experience with AMD5x86-133 or Cyrix-5x86-120 with FreeBSD?
Date: 13 May 1996 04:04:46 GMT
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -- Greenbelt, Maryland USA
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <TSINGLE.96May13000446@sunland.gsfc.nasa.gov>
References: <3195B8D6.1DD8@cylatech.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sunland.gsfc.nasa.gov
In-reply-to: Wilson MacGyver's message of Sun, 12 May 1996 06:09:26 -0400

>  Anyone uses either AMD 5x86-133 or Cyrix-5x86-120 with FreeBSD?
>  If so, has the experience been postive or negative?

I recently upgraded from a 486-33 to a Cx5x86-120.  The only problem I
had was my 486-33 kernel didn't find my modem ``at isa? port "IO_COM1"
tty irq 4 vector siointr''.  To resolve this problem, all I did was
rebuild the kernal after rearranging the order of sio devices in my
kernel config file so the modem was no longer the first sio device.
Except for this minor problem, everything seems to work just fine with
the Cx5x86.

As for the performance improvement, I have two real-life measurements:

First, I have a rather large library that took 15 minutes 40.20
seconds to make on the 486-33 and only takes 6 minutes 59.99 seconds
on the Cx5x86-120.  Making the library of course does a lot of disk IO
and also a lot of writes to the xterm.

And second, I have a simulation that took 1:51:24.82 on the 486-33 and
only 38:54.05 on the Cx5x86-120.  The simulation does a lot of writes
to the xterm but no disk IO and no floating point; it is mostly tight
loops that probably fit in cache.

These numbers are in line with my expectations; I'm quite happy with
the Cx5x86!

tim
--
Tim Singletary, August Automation Inc., (301) 286-8606