On 11 Mar 99, at 11:48, David Brenner, Ph.D. wrote:

> I have been given the go ahead to purchase a workstation which will be
> used for heavy mathamatical calculations using Excel. I mostly run monte
> carlo simulation models ( @Risk, Crystal Ball) which cause excel to
> re-calc a spreadsheet as much as 10,000 - 20,000 or more times. Some of
> the model files are extremely large spreadsheets, >50 mb.
>
> I would be upgrading from a dual 166 MMX machine.
>
> The questions for the group is the processor for such a system. Would a
> Xenon be worth the money? Should I stick with a PII or possible PIII?
> Should I wait for AMD's K-7? Would that processor be a good fit for number
> crunching? Does Intel have anything coming down the pike in the near
> future that would be worth waiting for?

  Xeon (only one 'n') is being pushed for servers, which probably means
its main differences are in the I/O protion of the CPU.  PIII adds new
instructions for 3D rendering.  But indications to date are that for a
typical CPU-bound user application such as you describe, the
performance difference between a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 MHz, a
PII-450, a PIII-450 and a Xeon-450 is likely to be negligible despite
their price range.  [Note that Celeron can be modified for dual-CPU
systems, but Intel doesn't support that....  Of the Intel-supported
solutions, dual PII is probably biggest bang for fewest bucks.

  I'm not sure whether Excel recalculation takes advantage of Intel's
pipelining of floating-point instructions or not.  This is an area
where Intel's CPUs have held the lead, but early reports suggest that
the K7 may have caught up in this regard.

> I am not sure if the software I use within Excel to run the models
> would work under an Alpha chip., otherwise that would also be a
> consideration. How good is the PC emulation software for the alpha?

  I think you'd do better to get an Alpha version of Excel than to run
the x86 version on emulation.  It's neat that you CAN, but it voids most
of the point of getting an Alpha if your main application is emulated.

> The models are run under WinNT 4.0 WS. Would a dual processor system be
> worth the price?

  NT WS can use dual CPUs just fine, and in fact it sounds like your
use of the machine is a good candidate for it.


David G

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