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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)
AMD 221.450.0%Dec 11 3:59 PM EST

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To: andreas_wonisch who wrote (19781)11/20/2000 1:38:31 PM
From: fyodor_Read Replies (7) of 275872
 
<andreas: Expensive and slow: Intels Pentium 4 fails in performance test>

Ouch.

I think a lot of these negative comments are due to unrealistic expectations. If you compare the PIII to P4 transition to the P5 to P6 transition, the P4 actually looks pretty good.

By all accounts, the P4 clocks more than 50% higher than the PIII and there is little doubt that it has much, much more headroom. Performance on "legacy code" is on-par with the highest-clocking of the old core (on a per-process basis). This is mostly due to the conscious choice from Intel to introduce brand-new instructions (SSE2), instead of trying to improve legacy code.

Choices like this will virtually always result in relatively poor performance on legacy code, but provide much better performance in the long run. This is Intel's way of avoiding the problems with the x86 instruction set, while preserving backwards compatibility.

Additionally, the P4 introduces a new, much improved platform, not the least of which is the quad-pumped FSB.

Face it, "revolutionary new architectures" from Intel have ALWAYS been "expensive and slow" for 90%+ of consumers. For the remaining few percent that either have very high bandwidth requirements or that hand-optimize much of their code, the new architecture is the way to go.

Like the PPro, the P4 is big and expensive. Like the PPro in its second version, the P4 will be an excellent product for a wide range of consumers.

-fyo
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