Jozef, Re: "I haven't taken time to think about the conclusions of the test. I could of course use some hints from Kap about his interpretation."
I strongly suggest you form your own opinion, first, before listening to someone who has a clear agenda on what he'd like you to believe.
Re: "It would be crazy of someone to deliver app optimized for P4 in exclusion to anyting else (Pii, Piii, Athlon, K6), since P4 is in single digits of the total installed base, and as you said in another post, the future notebooks will not be based on the P4 core."
The problem with a lot of code today is that it exposes problems in all of the current micro-architectures - Athlon and Pentium III included. However, these CPUs are the standard base for comparison, so you wouldn't know what it would be like to have the code fully optimized for them. The problem with the Pentium 4 is that many of the kinds of code that hurts the Athlon and Pentium III, hurts the Pentium 4 twice as much. This is partly due to the longer Pentium 4 pipeline, and also because of some of the sacrifices made to optimize some parts of the core over others. The solution, which would be to optimize for all the micro-architectures, would improve performance across the board, but most especially to the Pentium 4, which had a larger penalty to begin with. I'm sure you wouldn't object to optimizations that help all the CPUs out there, even if Pentium 4 improves more, would you?
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