Hello!

I was very pleased with the way 'cyril' (233MHz Cyrix MII,
VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset, 64Mb RAM) ran NetBSD.  Cyril may be
running NetBSD again before very long, once I build its
successor.

When I started accumulating components for cyril, one of the
points in favour of Super7 instead of Slot1 was that the
latter left you with a single-source of processors (Intel).
These days the choice is mostly between Intel's Socket370 &
AMD's SocketA.  Processors for Socket370 are available from
VIA and from Intel.  So far as I'm aware, processors for
SocketA are only available from AMD.

One of my clients has some machines that pre-date my
involvement in their IT purchasing decisions.  Some months
ago, one of those machines went up in smoke ...literally. As
they're a non-profit organisation, they couldn't afford a
replacement machine.  Eventually the user brought in a
machine from home, just so that she'd have something to type
on!  Since then, reliability has been a primary concern for
me - not least because the downtime could have cost them a
valued staff member (thankfully she has a new machine now).

I had been considering AMD microprocessors for some new
machines (I've been wary of Intel's processors, and perhaps
their business practices, for some time).  One article (and
video clip) that changed my mind was this one at Tom's
Hardware Guide...

  http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/index.html

      ...I'd much rather the processors didn't waste so much
energy as heat in the first place, but the way they respond
when things go wrong gives some insight as to the designers'
way of thinking.  The 'test' in question is drastic I know,
but the chip and mainboard should survive.

For applications that aren't processor intensive, I'm
inclined towards the VIA C3 (I haven't evaluated it yet, but
what I've read about it so far make me want to). Celeron was
an obscenity when it was released, but the latest .15u and
.13u chips look respectable enough for me to think about
using them where more horsepower is appropriate.

I'd welcome other people's thoughts on all this.

Anyway, the only machine in this room that's currently
running NetBSD is 'bushfire' (some form of Pentium at 100MHz
with 32Mb RAM).  Here's Peter's benchmark...

-------------------------<bushfire>-------------------------
bushfire: {1} dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=16m count=256
256+0 records in
256+0 records out
4294967296 bytes transferred in 68 secs (63161283 bytes/sec)
------------------------------------------------------------

Regards,
  - Andy Ball.