Fuchi,
Now, he is preying the importance of FPU
I think Tom fell in love with 3D games. I would like to know what percentage of games bought are 3D games. 25%? 30%? Majority of the game are not 3D. None of the strategy games need 3D horsepower. And there are all kinds of adventure games that don't need 3D either.
It is pretty strange that CPUs are judged by this one program. It's not really FPU performance in real life applications that is a problem. In real life FPU related programs - AutoCAD, Excel, Lotus - MX does just fine. It either matches or exceeds performance of equivalent P-II.
So in my opinion, the whole FPU issue is almost irrelevant. It's too bad that the lack of marketing, or lack of awarness to what's going on in the real world on part of Cyrix/NSM, has relegated Cyrix CPUs to such huge discounts.
In normal application, every FPU instruction is wrapped with a number of integer, branching and load instructions. This limits the rate at which FPU instructions can be issued. Since the rate of how fast the FPU instructions can be issued is limited, a single FPU unit is sufficient to keep up.
Then there is Quake, where ratio of FPU/non-FPU instructions is much higher. So the advantage of superior FPU is more evident.
I think Cyrix marketing should spend some time explaining this to the magazine editors and reviewers. Their complete failure to explain this is obvious. To their credit, there was 1 ad in PC magazine attempting to explain this, but I think I was the only one who red it in it's entirety. There is no follow up. The one liners by Tobak are useless if you can't explain the deeper issues.
Just look at Intel web site and their "3 vectors of performance" bull$hit. Cyrix should have a reply to it on their web site. Something like 2 vectors of performance: 1 being all the applications except Quake, the other being Quake. They should go out of their way to demonstrate how much better P-II is at Quake, but how similar or even inferior it is in all the other applications.
They should spice with something like CEO saying that he is not going to spend extra so that his employees can play Quake on company time.
Joe |
