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To: Gary Ng who wrote (92663)	11/17/1999 5:13:00 AM
From: Process Boy	Respond to of 186894

Gary - <Just curious what would be the typical application mix where one can see the real benefit of i840/RDRAM.> Ten could probably answer this better than I. I would assume FP intensive apps. PB

To: Gary Ng who wrote (92663)	11/17/1999 1:40:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Gary and all, <From the spec score, it seems that i840 with RDRAM really don't show too much performance gain comparing to 440BX.> I looked at Intel's performance briefs entitled "Intel Pentium III processor and Intel 440BX Performance Brief" and "Intel Pentium III processor and Intel 840 Performance Brief." (I forget where to find them, but I'm sure you can go to developer.intel.com and do a search for these PDF documents.) Here are the results: 440BX 440BX 840 840 650 MHz 700 MHz 667 MHz 733 MHz ------- ------- ------- ------- SPECint95 31.6 33.8 33.0 35.6 SPECint95_base 31.3 33.5 32.4 35.3 SPECfp95 22.9 23.5 29.0 30.4 SPECfp95_base 22.4 23.2 28.2 29.7 It seems that 840 provides a small performance advantage for SPECint95, as the 840/667 MHz scores come very close to the 440BX/700 MHz scores. But for SPECfp95, the performance advantage is huge, as the 840/667 MHz absolutely trounces the 440BX/700 MHz. Both systems were almost identically configured. There were only three differences I saw between the two systems: 1) One used 256 MB PC100 SDRAM while the other used 256MB PC800 RDRAM. (Duh) 2) The 840 had an Ultra ATA-66 controller, while the 440BX didn't. Both used the same hard drive, though. 3) The 840 had AGP-4x, while the 440BX didn't. In my opinion, #2 and #3 don't have a very significant effect on the SPEC scores. Perhaps this is part of what Micron meant when they said "The 840 is fast as hell. The price you pay for the performance is certainly worth it." Tenchusatsu