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

To: kapkan4u who wrote (96439)	3/4/2000 2:13:00 AM
From: Ali Chen	Respond to of 1571911

<<Willamette's FPU will not run faster than 700 MHz.> Ok, I will give you this one. > I am not so convinced. Looking through the marketing blurb developer.intel.com on p.4-2 we read: "Shifts cost 2 or 4 Mclks on Willamette processors vs. 1 on P6 family processors. Integer and floating-point multiplies cost as many as 10 Mclks on Willamette processors vs. 4 on P6 family processors." It seems clear that it is the same P6-family ALU at about 700MHz, but the CLOCK is DOUBLED! Fake clock! Maybe some primitive ops can finish in one fake clock, some even in between ticks, but all major calculations are the same as a 700MHz Coppermine! Even worse, the clock is 2x, but execution times are 2.5-4X longer. BTW, if some instruction can be executed in one fake clock, what the other 19 stages in Willy's pipeline are doing? Milling hot air? Just passing the result along 19 latches until it retires? And what about floating unit? Read on, p.1-5 says: "Floating-point operations on the Willamette processor will still take longer to execute than integer operations (depending on the specific floating-point operation) as they do on P6 family processors." Why Intel needs this excuse? Do I hear a hint here? Like does FPU run at half of something? However, all this does not matter. What does matter is the 3.2Gbytes/s i/o bandwidth. How Willy's systems suppose to feed it? Four RAMBUS channels at once? But that will make a BIG difference in performance. Unfortunately, some managers in some companies still don't get the "memory wall" right. And, of course, the dual-pumped clock will be an ace in Intel marketing hands. - Ali