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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (68168)	8/9/1999 9:10:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578495

<You may say I am being selective in my choice of benchmarks, and I am.> Well, as long as you are honest. ;-) That's the problem, however. There are instances where Athlon is only slightly faster than Pentium III, most notably in Sharky Extreme's Athlon 600 benchmarks: www3.sharkyextreme.com How come for the 3D benchmark results (SSE and 3DNow! disabled), Pentium III 600 comes within 5% of Athlon 600? An aberration, perhaps? For the most part, you are right. Especially for 3D Studio Max, the Athlon overpowers Pentium III by a wide margin (45.3%), enough to make me a believer. But in Tom's tests: tomshardware.com the margin was much lower for Quake 2 (15.8% and 10.1%) The next page is also very weird: tomshardware.com The margin for Half-Life is 36.0%, yet only 1.5% for Shogo! Tom attributes this to "3D-chip's limits," but then again, his review is rather biased, as if Athlon needs any of his bias. So you tell me which numbers we should believe as representative of Athlon's true power. We can go through the Net and pick and choose which benchmarks to show. But I'd rather see something that is more consistent, something that gives me a good idea as to what the real advantage of Athlon is. No one is doubting Athlon's FPU performance, but it does bother me that the results are all over the place, even those within a single review. AMD, of course, will tell you to believe the most optimistic benchmarks, claiming that they are truly representative of Athlon's future potential. On the other hand, they've been talking about 3DNow's "potential" for the K6-2 and the K6-III for a year now, and none of that potential materialized. Athlon may be a different case because of its high clock speeds, but given AMD's penchant for exaggeration (like Athlon needs it, once again), I'll wait until the true potential is consistently reached. Tenchusatsu