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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (70778)	9/2/1999 3:55:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574102

Paul, <Merced CPUs have been out of fab only 2 1/2 weeks and already your "experts" are "dissing" the benchmarks> Not to be too harsh but my "so-called experts" really is an expert. I think I need to take time to talk about John McCalpin, his reputation a bit about what he has done (a bit). McCalpin came to SGI from the University of Delaware where he has a PHd in some sort of Oceanography research.. His interest in bandwidth is an outgrowth of such research. Ocean modeling (like weather) requires huge simulations with huge matrixes/grids .. resulting in huge bandwidth requirements on the machines that run such models. For years he was the greatest proponent of RS/6000 boxes because of their great memory bandwidth capability. Of course he changed his tune when he went to SGI (hard to pump up the competition :-) His STREAM research is a key metric in determining how well a high-performance box is/can perform: cs.virginia.edu Here is some bio info: cs.virginia.edu Since he has left SGI and is now at IBM, several of the links to SGI on that page are broken. So when you rant and rave: <Heck - do you think Intel has even the appropriate software debugged yet to even DO THE BENCHMARKS ?> You must understand that McCalpin is a serious scientist that is involved in the day to day DESIGN of high-performance machines ... not your run of the mill Usenet flunky.. so when he talks about Merced performance in unglowing terms he essentially KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT and isn't given to hype. As an exercise, I encourage you to visit www.deja.com and search comp.arch for mccalpin and read the dozens of threads he has participated in .. in the last several years. Yes, Merced performance is sucking. Will it get better? Absolutely. Will it outperform K7 at integer benchmarks this time next year? Doubt it. Rob