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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer who wrote (118589)	11/20/2000 3:30:30 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Elmer, The P4 processor scores 558 on SPEC2000FP while AMD's highest score is 311. I think AMD will gladly concede the market of SPEC users to Intel. But don't you find it interesting that this supposed advantage of P4 never made it to the applications that people use? The lack of performance in widely used applications is something that is very puzzling. What do you think is the reason for the poor performance? The reasons I have heard are: - length of the pipeline - high percentage of time spend in the OS, that has hard to predict branches, magnifying the branch mispredict penalty - high percentage of branches in real world applications resulting in the same penalty - trace cache, and the bottleneck of the decoder to fill it up - latency problems of Rambus memory (that should be partially taken care of by hardware prefetch) - small L1 cache Is there anything else you can think of? Which one of these can be improved in the future tweaks of the core? I think the raw clock speed may compensate for these shortcomings, that's why I think Intel will need to maintain about 30% lead in clock speed to remain competitive in performance. Joe