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To: Scumbria who wrote (108991)	8/30/2000 2:38:31 PM
From: jcholewa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, Don't get too optimistic. Remember Tom Pabst's prerelease PII scores? Or Thresh's prerelease K7 scores? Those previews basically said that the processors in question were crap. But they turned out just fine in the end. There is substantial reason (the long pipe, perhaps the trace cache issue rate, Intel's own word) to believe that the P4 will have lower general per-clock performance than PIII/Athlon. But regardless of loyalties in this most interesting of wars, I think it's best to give Intel the benefit of the doubt as to the severity of this situation. Also, not counting fpu performance (which, imho, seems to act differently to integer performance in these limited benchmarkfests I've seen), Willamette may merely not like Sandra very much. For all we know, Sandra might be the worst case scenario of the popular benchmarks. We may find that ZDNet's and PC World's benchmarks, for example, very highly favour the P4. And it's these benchmarks (well, and Q3/UT/MDK2) that will determine performance guesstimates for the mass media. -JC

To: Scumbria who wrote (108991)	8/30/2000 2:50:19 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, I thought the text under those benchmarks was interesting, especially the part that I put in bold: Now we all need to remember that today's benchmarking software was not written with the P4 in mind. Some of the numbers look really low, but you can also see that SciSoft Sandra has no idea how to treat Willy's "Quad Pumped" system bus. I'm sure that when the chip is released, the benchmark scores will improve a bit. But the CLIBench scores are pretty similar to some of today's faster processors. There is one very interesting result in those Sandra and CLIBench numbers though... We all nearly fell out of our collective chairs when we saw the picture showing the VAST memory bandwidth that the Pentium 4 + Rambus solution provides. This is truly a remarkable number. There has been a lot of talk lately about Memory bandwidth. It's common knowledge that SDRAM just isn't going to be able to keep up with the ever-escalating clock speeds and system bus speeds that have been coming out of both the Intel and AMD camps. Rambus has really been in question over the last several months. Its high cost and questionable performance have really prevented it from being considered a viable option for the average user. I think this benchmark shows that in accordance with the 400 MHz system bus that Willy provides, Rambus is capable of pushing some incredible numbers. We can only hypothesize at this point on how DDR-RAM will perform alongside a Pentium 4 processor. I look forward to some comparative numbers when a DDR+Pentium 4 solution becomes available.

To: Scumbria who wrote (108991)	8/30/2000 4:17:42 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, I've seen those benchmarks already. If that's the true performance of a Pentium 4 running at "250 MHz," I can't wait to see the performance of Pentium 4 running at 1.5 GHz! Seriously, I don't know what to make of those benchmarks. I'm starting to believe that Pentium 4 will indeed require optimized programs before its true potential can be unleashed. That bodes ill for legacy benchmarks, especially at launch, and the enthusiast web sites like Tom's Hardware will have a field day. On the other hand, it could mean better performance in future benchmarks as more and more software is optimized for Pentium 4 and SSE2. But hey, if worse comes to worse and Pentium 4 performance is indeed abysmal, at least Itanium will look that much better in comparison. I'm still very worried about Willamette and Foster overshadowing Itanium, at least in a few areas. Tenchusatsu