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To: Joe NYC who wrote (118653)	11/20/2000 6:35:53 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Joe, I wonder how much of the "head room" has already been used up, and how much is left. Probably a lot. Tom has already overclocked it to 1.73 GHz, and Intel is talking 2.0 in Q3. Looks like a horserace alright. Competition is good. I see this Intel-AMD race resulting in faster processors with which to go after the Sun Micros of the world (assuming some of this GHz flogging makes its way into Itaniums, and of course, Fosters). Tony

To: Joe NYC who wrote (118653)	11/20/2000 6:42:21 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: "The applications where P4 stinks the most are mostly integer based, running under Windows, which is also strictly integer based, so no optimizations will help here, only a substantially higher clock speeds" Huh??? The P4 posted the highest integer scores ever measured for any processor on the planet in SPEC2000 and by a significant margin. Those scores were measured running WIN2000 and now you claim it won't benefit from code optimization because it stinks at integer??? Re: "In clock for clock, P4 gets absolutely slaughtered by both P3 and Athlon" Joe this is a silly argument. The P3 tops out at a little over 1GHz on the .18u process and P4 will hit 2GHz on the same process. You are arguing apples and oranges because the 2 do not compare in frequency. Neither does Athlon. Who cares what the frequency is, it's the performance that counts at any given point in time. If all you cared about is frequency for marketing purposes then P4 is still far and away the leader regardless of it's lead in pure performance. EP

To: Joe NYC who wrote (118653)	11/20/2000 7:04:56 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Joe, <Let's not forget that the market penetration of SSE-2 is zero. MMX was a big yawn, 3DNow and SSE got a little more support, but it is still slow in coming despite much wider market penetration.> And think about the huge flood of x86-64 optimized software when Hammer is released. By the way, you'll notice that even Herr Uberclockermeister is looking forward to SSE2-optimized software, now that AMD's Hammer series will support it. Anyway, there are no more processors coming out these days which can demonstrate substantially better performance without resorting to the compiler or ISA extensions. Athlon might have been the last. <The applications where P4 stinks the most are mostly integer based, running under Windows, which is also strictly integer based, so no optimizations will help here, only a substantially higher clock speeds.> You might have to narrow your definition of "integer-based" applications. Would hardware RSA encryption count? Pentium 4 w/ SSE2 will scream on this sort of app, thanks to 128-bit integer SIMD. What about Photoshop? Speech recognition? MPEG4? (The last two I'm not sure about.) I see two types of applications which could give P4 a hard time. They are office apps (which no one cares about speeding up anyways) and compilers or interpreters for languages like C++, Java, Visual Basic, etc. (which many people do care about). But then again, Athlon isn't going to show much performance scalability in these apps, either. <I wonder how much of the "head room" has already been used up, and how much is left.> Intel already demonstrated a "gee whiz" 2.0 GHz demo on 0.18u silicon. They plan to have this in Q3 of next year. AMD may come close, but they'll be resorting to a 0.15u half-shrink (which Intel doesn't have). When 0.13u comes around, Intel will be ahead of AMD process-wise and speed-wise, leaving AMD no other choice but to pin their hopes on SOI. <P4 needs 30% clock speed advantage to keep up with Athlon in performance.> Athlon might be able to achieve 1.33 GHz on 0.18u. 30% above that is 1.7 or 1.8 GHz. I have no doubt that Pentium 4 can easily achieve those speeds at 0.18u. Tenchusatsu