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

To: Process Boy who wrote (85081)	1/5/2000 3:14:00 AM
From: ptanner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574017

PB <What's your take on the OCUS R20 benchmark suite? Did you read the Anandtech ProENGINEER vs. PIII vs. Athlon review? Any comment appreciated.> I finally read Anandtech's article and he seems thorough as usual. Thanks for the reminder to read it! My CAD use is comparatively modest 2-D using AutoCAD and the delays for most activities are minimal even on my old MMX-166. Thoughts on the article and its conclusions: The tests isolated the CPU by providing the same supporting hardware -- so they compare the difference between a $100 Celeron and a $800 P3/Athlon top of the line. While the high-end chip is 8x the low-end it provides about 2x the performance. However, the total system cost between the setups would be much smaller and the incremental cost of a high-end processor would likely be very cost-effective, particularly if you include the installation/change-over costs relative to product life-cycle. Other comments... the progress in PCs during the last decade has exceeded the demands that I place on the machine for CAD. My old "high-end" demands are now relatively small compared to any current action game and for these select applications appropriate selection of supporting components (memory, graphics card, HD) is likely more important. There are also often more than one approach to achieving the same result in CAD and some colleagues believe the best way to train a new drafter to be efficient is on a slow machine to encourage good work habits. Before reading the article I was not familiar with the test suite used but it sounds appropriate. It appears though that to get even the computationally intense actions to provide significant time results required quite a few repetitions. Even while working in CAD my machine is mostly idling away awaiting my last instruction. PT ps: Other reviews that I have seen (PCWorld?) include AutoCAD 2000 benchmarks for which the Athlon seemed to provide significantly (20%) better performance relative to P3. In making a business purchase, the reliability and support of the vendor will be more important to me than the brand of the processor or small price differences.

To: Process Boy who wrote (85081)	1/5/2000 4:10:00 AM
From: Mani1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574017

PB Re <<Did you read the Anandtech ProENGINEER vs. PIII vs. Athlon review? Any comment appreciated.>> I think the ProE benchmark are pretty lame. They do a task 100 times or so, just for it to take enough time for the benchmark. An average design takes only seconds to rotate, shade, render etc. What really takes time is not Computer Aided Design (CAD), it is computer aided analysis, FEA (Finite element analysis) can take hours or even days for more complex geometries. Virtually any mechanical parts has gone through some sort of FEA. From what I understand the time it takes to perform those analysis is directly proportional to floating point performance. Mani