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

To: niceguy767 who wrote (35658)	4/13/2001 11:28:38 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

NG, my favorite flippant bit from McComas's piece was this: The anticipation of this massive re-shuffling of the P4’s platform infrastructure has directly contributed to the market’s conspicuously lukewarm reaction to Intel’s transitory P4+850 platform. No one wants to invest in a dead end road. My favorite Intel marchitecture revelation was about the "vortex" database, which, on the P4, uses 4x the memory bandwidth for negligible performance gain: Intel quotes average bandwidth consumption at 100MB/s for the P3+840, while the P4+850 platform roars ahead to about 400MB/s on average. On the surface this appears to be a magnificent revelation of the power of the P4. If the P4 consumes 4x more bandwidth, is that an indication that it can do 4x more work? Perhaps it will deliver a magnificent performance boost… Not surprisingly, one vital piece of information was selectively omitted from the presentation –Actual Benchmark Scores! We located Intel’s internally generated SPEC scores at www.spec.org, and discovered essentially no difference in performance between the two platforms. Even with a 50% clock speed advantage and an unexplained 4x hunger for bandwidth, the P4 produced a performance delta of only 3.5%. (For contrast we included the 1.33GHz Athlon+DDR, which delivers the best score of all.) Clearly, something is fishy. We all know about the P4’s pipeline problems, excessive branch misprediction penalties, a poor L1 cache implementation, etc., but perhaps something else is out of balance here. All in all, quite entertaining, the marchitects have a tough road ahead of them. However, with the force of NetB*s technology behind them, who knows what they'll be able to pull off?