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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (15141)	10/19/2000 9:58:45 PM
From: dougSF30	Respond to of 275872

Dan, If there are other applications running, then memory usage (and resource usage in general) can be much more inefficient, and measuring 'CPU time' won't save you. For example, as multiple processes timeslice back and forth, they'll compete for the level 1 & 2 caches, the result being that the overall CPU time to run processes in parallel can be significantly longer than running them in series. (Note that the reverse can also be true, hence SMT, but EPIC doesn't handle this well at all-- the architecture is designed to work best when one thread has been carefully mapped to the CPU resources by the compiler, and is not disturbed.) But, as you say, Merced is simply an expensive emulator for future EPIC CPUs, given that its performance is so crappy compared with current 32-bit offerings from Intel and AMD, and probably really blows when compared to an Alpha 64-bit chip. Doug