re: They present a bunch of benchmarks showing that Itanium is mediocre, at best, then conclude it's fabulous - go figure.
Dan-
Your lack of credibility is showing again. Why do you keep doing this??
The Itanium is a true floating-point rocket! Remember, the numbers on the bottom of the
graph indicate the floating-point instruction mix. In other words, "47/53/0" means the
instruction mix is 47% addittion/subtraction, 53% multiplication, and 0% division. Most
software generally has the same instruction mix as the first 5 tests (little FDIV). At 733
MHz, the Itanium is as much as twice as fast as a 1.2 GHz Athlon and 4 times faster
than the x87 FPU of the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4!
The results are very clear, the Itanium executes eight times as many FP instructions per
clock cycle than the Pentium 4. Talk about massive parallelism! The Itanium FPU is a
"RISC-like" FPU: many registers (128), 3 address calculations, and many parallel units.
Three addresses per instruction means that a register is used for storing the result,
instead of overwriting one of the operands. Consider an addition, the RISC and Itanium
ASM code will produce:
Frank |
