Gary,
Performance of the CPU core (despite it's radical changes) didn't increase dramatically. The main changes that make Pentium perform faster than 486 is 64 bit memory access, bigger and faster cache, faster FPU.
While 5x86 core may be below 100% of the performance of Pentium core, it is faster than 486. But MediaGX has 64 bit memory bus, matching Pentium. One performance advantage of MediaGX over Pentium is more efficient memory access.
In configurations including Pentium + L2, memory access efficiency is not that significant, since well over 80% of memory accesses are from L2.
But many notebooks don't include L2. So with faster memory (SDRAM), running at faster speed (reported to be at 83 MHz), the memory access advantage of MediaGX reduce, in not completely eliminate any performance advantages of Pentium.
One thing that is still unknown is the size of L1 of MediaGXm. MediaGX had 16K, the same as Pentium, but Pentium MMX has 32K. This would ofcourse be a big plus for Pentium MMX.
The 2 Compaq notebooks - 166 MHz Pentium-MMX and 200 MHz MediaGX should be in the same ballpark performance-wise. I hope to see some benchmarks to know which one comes on top.
Joe |
