wbmw,
My only point here is that I am skeptical about Hammer reaching a performance rating that is equivalent or faster than a Pentium 4 Northwood running at 3.4GHz.
Ok, so you are talking about performance, not model numbers. Sorry, I was a bit confused.
But why NW 3.4 GHz? It's kind of backwards. I seem to recall a statement of Hammer beeing rated 3400+ at some point in the future. I guess that's where NW 3.4 GHz is coming from. And you are saying that Hammer 3400+ will not beat NW 3.4 GHz? That's back to model ratings.
I think it would make more sense to talk about performance at introduction of first processor in Hammer generation which will be Clawhammer. This may not necessarily be the Hammer 3400+ someone at AMD mentioned (which may be the server version to be introduced in 2003).
If the introduction of Clawhammer is the end of 2002, it will need to outperform NW at 2.8 or 3 GHz, running at 133 MHz FSB x 4, possibly with SMT, with 512K L2.
My guess is that it would take a hypothetical Palomino/Thoroughbred/Barton at 2.3 to 2.5 GHz to match it. With some improvements that will go into Hammer, it would probably take 2 GHz to 2.2 GHz Clawhammer to match the top of the line NW, which seems like a very realistic clock speed expectation for Clawhammer.
Of course this is in 32bit apps. There will be an app here and there that will benefit from being compiled to 64 bit executable, and with those apps, in the long mode, with additional registers available, Clawhammer should pull away.
But in 32bit, where 99% of the processors will b used, I think it will be a horse race again.
Joe |
