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To: pgerassi who wrote (118920)	11/22/2000 2:42:50 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: The P4 implementation of x87 code is really bad. Terriffic post! Regards, Dan

To: pgerassi who wrote (118920)	11/22/2000 3:15:52 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Pete,<<<The one area where the P4 is competent is the large data set small code set programs. These are those that do very little decision making and thus fit comfortably in the trace cache and the few branches cause very little pipeline stalling. The P4 does get the data in and out fast but, this advantage can disappear rapidly>>> Marketing people tell me that Data Warehousing and Database mining constitute 90% of commercial usage of servers, where 85% of Intel commercial business revenue exists. It may be that Intel people know what they are doing. Mary

To: pgerassi who wrote (118920)	11/22/2000 3:25:20 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Dear Pete, Re: "The P4 implementation of x87 code is really bad. Even looking at the new Sandra benchmarks with SSE2 optimization reports x87 speed at the same time as SSE2 speed. The x87 speed is about that of a top end Celeron. Without SSE2, P4 is dog meat wrt other CPUs." Just who do you think you're arguing with? I haven't seen anyone try defending x87 code on a P4. You are arguing with no one but yourself. P4 has SSE2 and it provides world class FP performance far beyond what Athlon offers. You want to run old x87 code? Get an Athlon. Re: "The one reason for buying a PC is that the main processing unit is general purpose in nature. It does many things well instead of a few things great. Those tasks needing greatness are placed in special purpose hardware. Graphics cards are taking over the large loads of geometry processing and MPEG compression and decompression. Sound cards are taking over the large loads of MP3 compression, MP3 decompression, 3D environment modeling, and voice to syllable conversion. These are offloading the CPU for those tasks that are done frequently enough to make speciallized hardware cheap and profitable. What is not being moved over from the CPU is tasks that are complex in nature like AI, web serving, parsing, decision support systems, modeling, and scheduling. All of these typically are branch heavy, have large working code set sizes, and high processing to bandwidth ratios. For these future GP CPU applications that will make an increasing proportion of the processing work load, the P4 does very poorly" As usual you think that if you say it, it will be true. You have claimed the P4 does very poorly in these GP CPU applications but you haven't given a single example of a P4 benchmark based on P4 optimized code. You're just rehashing the old argument that it doesn't run old code quite as well as new code. I gave you a GP benchmark of P4 running P4 optimized code of the following and it's the fastest processor on the planet. Compression FPGA Circuit Placement and Routing C Programming Language Compiler Combinatorial Optimization Game Playing: Word Processing C++ Computer Visualization PERL Programming Language Group Theory, Interpreter Object-oriented Database Compression Place and Route Simulator Here it does very well coming in as the second fastest processor in the world. Physics / Quantum Chromodynamics Shallow Water Modeling Multi-grid Solver: 3D Potential Field Parabolic / Elliptic Partial Differential Equations 3-D Graphics Library Computational Fluid Dynamics Image Recognition / Neural Networks Seismic Wave Propagation Simulation Image Processing: Face Recognition Computational Chemistry Number Theory / Primality Testing Finite-element Crash Simulation High Energy Nuclear Physics Accelerator Design Meteorology: Pollutant Distribution So we have you on one side claiming the P4 stinks and providing no data and the SPEC Organization claiming it is essentially the fastest processor on the planet and they back it up with data. I don't have any trouble deciding who to believe. EP