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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (127656)	2/17/2001 8:16:19 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Joe, I'm sure that the reason that the K7 does well and the P4 does poorly is that all of the FPU is performed by the x87 unit for that program. It's really kind of sad that vendors won't even try to get more performance out of their programs with a simple recompile, but then again, they've got limited resources as well. Pentium 4 apparently sold 100,000 units in Q4 of last year. Compared to the installed base of close to 500 million to 1 billion computers, P4 amounts to about 0.01% to 0.02% of the total. Do you think it would be a rational decision to optimize software for 0.01% of the market, so that the software uses SSE2 units of P4, but no longer operates on 99.99% of installed base of computers? (that do not support SSE2) P4 optimized code also supports standard x86 FPU, so that is not the issue. The problem is that recompiling a large piece of code with a new compiler is not simple. There will be lots of new bugs, and having a new platform to support only adds to the issues. It is probably 12 months of many people's work to bring up and qualify a complex software product on a new platform. That is one reason why we won't see P4 optimized business software for a long time. Scumbria