Burt - Re: "Short Sales"
I hope this is good news, as you imply.
What makes me a little nervous right now is that all the news - business, technical, etc. - regarding Intel seems so ROSY. I keep listening for a bomb to go off.
Does the WSJ , or any other source, indicate the distribution of short sell prices - that is, the actual stock price that the short investor borrowed and sold the stock?
By the way, an interesting article was posted by PC magazine on their WEB site. I don't have the URL but you can get it from the CYRIX forum - look for a post with today's date.
The article was supposed to be an evaluation of some new HP computer with a Pentium (200 MHz). But PC magazine discovered that the actual chip was the P55C with MMX extensions! They even published a photo as proof!
So, the chip exists. It did not even say "Engineering Sample" which most manufacturers put on the package as a disclaimer indicating that the version inside might not be the production version.
Key details - the P55C/MMX does have a 32K L1 cache on the chip, double the 16K size of the existing P55.
Speed tests with non-MMX software indicate a 7% - 14% improvement vs a P55 based on the SAME system -a good apples to apples comparison. So, the larger L1 cache is a good performance enhancer.
On the possibly negative side, PC Mag Labs ran a version of Adobe Photoshop which was supposedly made with MMX enhancements. The performance boost was not all that impressive. Perhaps 10% or so vs. the non MMX chip. How well the Adobe Photoshop is optomized for MMX instructions is not clear.
No mention of a heat problem could be found. John Dvorak, in a recent article in one trade publication, indicated an MMX power consumption issue. He didn't stipulate what chip (P55C or Klamath) he was referring to, so the information is a little suspect.
Paul |
