Dear Pete,
Re: "The P4 implementation of x87 code is really bad. Even looking at the new Sandra benchmarks with SSE2 optimization reports x87 speed at the same time as SSE2 speed. The x87 speed is about that of a top end Celeron. Without SSE2, P4 is dog meat wrt other CPUs."
Just who do you think you're arguing with? I haven't seen anyone try defending x87 code on a P4. You are arguing with no one but yourself. P4 has SSE2 and it provides world class FP performance far beyond what Athlon offers. You want to run old x87 code? Get an Athlon.
Re: "The one reason for buying a PC is that the main processing unit is general purpose in nature. It does many things well instead of a few things great. Those tasks needing greatness are placed in special purpose hardware. Graphics cards are taking over the large loads of geometry processing and MPEG compression and decompression. Sound cards are taking over the large loads of MP3 compression, MP3 decompression, 3D environment modeling, and voice to syllable conversion. These are offloading the CPU for those tasks that are done frequently enough to make speciallized hardware cheap and profitable. What is not being moved over from the CPU is tasks that are complex in nature like AI, web serving, parsing, decision support systems, modeling, and scheduling. All of these typically are branch heavy, have large working code set sizes, and high processing to bandwidth ratios. For these future GP CPU applications that will make an increasing proportion of the processing work load, the P4 does very poorly"
As usual you think that if you say it, it will be true. You have claimed the P4 does very poorly in these GP CPU applications but you haven't given a single example of a P4 benchmark based on P4 optimized code. You're just rehashing the old argument that it doesn't run old code quite as well as new code. I gave you a GP benchmark of P4 running P4 optimized code of the following and it's the fastest processor on the planet.
Compression
FPGA Circuit Placement and Routing
C Programming Language Compiler
Combinatorial Optimization
Game Playing:
Word Processing
C++ Computer Visualization
PERL Programming Language
Group Theory, Interpreter
Object-oriented Database
Compression
Place and Route Simulator
Here it does very well coming in as the second fastest processor in the world.
Physics / Quantum Chromodynamics
Shallow Water Modeling
Multi-grid Solver: 3D Potential Field
Parabolic / Elliptic Partial Differential Equations
3-D Graphics Library
Computational Fluid Dynamics
Image Recognition / Neural Networks
Seismic Wave Propagation Simulation
Image Processing: Face Recognition
Computational Chemistry
Number Theory / Primality Testing
Finite-element Crash Simulation
High Energy Nuclear Physics Accelerator Design
Meteorology: Pollutant Distribution
So we have you on one side claiming the P4 stinks and providing no data and the SPEC Organization claiming it is essentially the fastest processor on the planet and they back it up with data. I don't have any trouble deciding who to believe.
EP |
