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

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (80225)	11/17/1999 3:03:00 AM
From: Gary Ng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577146

Cirruslvr, Re: Yeah, but I was comparing Athlon 650 vs. PIII 650. Yes I know. But it seems that the overall system design has a significant impact on the specfp95 score(as the CPU is only 17Mhz faster). Anyone like to give a shoot about this huge difference ? Gary

To: Cirruslvr who wrote (80225)	11/17/1999 4:01:00 PM
From: Goutam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577146

Cirruslvr, This is especially for you to recognize your efforts in carrying the SPECstuff discussion with Elmer ;o) Found the link to this article at JC's site ( jc-news.com ) winmag.com _________ Camino's Here, But It's Still Not Faster Than Athlon November 16, 1999 by Jonathan Blackwood It's here, finally. Intel's new 820 (Camino) chipset, that is. I recently had the opportunity to benchmark a 733MHz Pentium III-powered Compaq Deskpro EN series PC onsite at Compaq's Houston headquarters. This PC is being announced today to coincide with Intel's belated rollout of the Camino chipset, although it won't be available for delivery until mid-December. Interestingly, I also have had the opportunity to benchmark a new Polywell PC powered by AMD's new 700MHz Athlon processor. Both the Compaq and the Polywell PCs were running NT, and the results of our benchmarks are interesting. The short version: Despite the Pentium III's higher clock rate, the Athlon-powered Polywell outperformed the Compaq on 8 of our 12 tests. The Polywell earned a WinScore mark of 165, representing 165% of the performance of our 450MHz Gateway Performance 450 reference PC. The Compaq's WinScore was 160, nothing to be sneezed at, but surprising when compared to the Polywell's score. There are a number of benchmark results that surprised me. For one thing, the Compaq bested the Polywell on 2D video throughput, uncached disk performance, Word performance and AutoCAD performance. The Polywell outperformed the Compaq on every other measure, including those for which Intel has proclaimed the superiority of the Coppermine Pentium III/Camino combination. For example, Intel's SSE instructions are supposed (according to Intel) to be superior to AMD's 3DNow! instructions. Yet the Polywell outperformed the Compaq in all of our benchmarks where these instructions should come into play, namely our OpenGL, Direct3D and Photoshop/DeBabelizer tests. Intel has also pushed the adoption of Rambus memory, which the 820 chipset supports, owing to its greater throughput. On our Wintune memory benchmark, however, the Polywell showed better memory throughput, at 118% that of the Compaq. As I've noted in this space before, to be fair to Intel, there may be other areas, such as what Intel calls concurrency, where the new Pentium IIIs with the 820 chipset might outperform the Athlon significantly. If so, it's apparent that our current benchmarks don't test for these things. Intel says that concurrency will become increasingly important when dealing with "streaming data" types, such as audio and video. Perhaps so, but I have to say, so far I haven't noticed any specific weakness of the Athlon chip in dealing with either of these data types. Let me be clear: The Pentium III/Camino combination offers outstanding performance. And no user would ever be able to notice the difference in performance between these two PCs, although we can measure the difference. For all practical purposes, these two PCs offer an equivalent level of performance. But there's the rub. To be honest, I had expected, I suppose, for Intel to pull a rabbit out of its hat, and to beat the Athlon's performance soundly, especially with its higher clock rate. Yet the Polywell beat the Compaq by an average of 8.24%. There are plenty of reasons to buy an Intel-powered PC, including stability of platform, high quality and stability of supply (though there have been reports of shortages of the 733MHz chip). But better performance than the AMD Athlon chip, at least according to our tests, is not one of them. _________________________________________________________ Regards, Goutama