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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (94698)	2/22/2000 11:15:00 PM
From: Epinephrine	Respond to of 1575622

RE: <Then ask yourself - did Intel design the Willamette FPU to be SLOWER than a Coppermine FPU ?> Paul, As I conceded to Elmer, without a doubt Willamette will have some bada$$ cool features. I realize that the numbers I have been citing are architectural theory and there are other factors that affect performance, (hence the ability of Coppermine to remain competitive with Athlon) and I don't doubt that AMD will be hard pressed to improve Athlon to the point where it can compete with Willamette but the mere fact that it is architecturally feasible to do so goes a long way toward alleviating my long term concerns for AMD. Thanks, Epinephrine

To: Paul Engel who wrote (94698)	2/22/2000 11:58:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575622

Paul, re:"Look at what we know. The AthWipey has a three issue FPU vs. a Coppermine single issue FPU - and the Coppermine is only slightly slower than an AthWipey in FPU performance. Why don't you ask why the Athwipey ISN'T THREE TIMES as fast as a Coppermine in FPU calculations - but only a few per centage points faster in SOME benchmarks - and slower in others ! Then ask yourself - did Intel design the Willamette FPU to be SLOWER than a Coppermine FPU ?" I will take issue with on how close coppermine is with Athlon - seems about 20% better. But you make excellent points however. It is inconcievable that Intels design folks would have designed a mediocre FPU. Your logic there indeed has merit. So likelihood is there is a bunch of undisclosed stuff yet. regards, Kash

To: Paul Engel who wrote (94698)	2/23/2000 12:52:00 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575622

Re: Why don't you ask why the Athwipey ISN'T THREE TIMES as fast as a Coppermine in FPU calculations... For solving LP optimization problems it often is: when we received our first Athlon 550s late last fall, we ran one of the models we're working on it and on a Pentium III/550 (not an E, obviously) as a test, and the same problem that ran 19 seconds on the Pentium ran 4 seconds on the Athlon. I've not brought it up before, because the comparison was not carefully controlled, and the PIII was running 98 while the Athlon was running NT (both IDE drives, both 128 meg PC100 SDRAM) The problem fits in main memory, so it wasn't an issue of virtual memory efficiency on the NT box, no disk swapping is observed when this model is run. My guess is that part of the code that fit in Athlon's L1 didn't fit in Pentium's L1 - the difference shouldn't have been that large. But, for whatever reason, it was. There is more to computing than games and word processing, and the code for much of that work comes out of Microsoft or Borland compilers, and isn't carefully optimized for any hardware. That's the code used in much of the business and scientific world, and that's the code that the Athlon runs well on - SIMD2 (or 3D-Now) won't help on most of the applications where performance really matters. Dan