Regarding the query about dual-core Athlon 4400+ vs. 4600+: (1) AMD is
phasing out some of its 2x1MB cache CPUs. That could affect pricing
short-term and availability altogether. Your system vendor may have
substituted the 4600+ if the 4400+ is hard to get (but should've told
you). (2) The larger cache would tend to be an advantage for code loops
and/or data small enough to fit into the cache. You might easily have a
chunk of looping code small enough to fit, but surely not imaging
data. In our experience with FSL on a dual-CPU Opteron 2.4GHz (Sun
running SUSE 10.0), FSL is almost entirely CPU-bound, crunching big
arrays, unlikely to fit in 1MB. Short of doing a systematic comparison,
I'd much prefer the 4600+ with its 9% faster clock rate and smaller
cache.
Gregory A. Miller, University of Illinois, Champaign.
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