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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (132611)	4/17/2001 1:53:50 PM
From: fingolfen	Respond to of 186894

The P90 was slower than a 486-66? Sure you're not refering to the Pentium 60/66 which would be a better analogy since they were on a larger process. Besides that, I like the P-Pro-P4 analogy better. ...but I'm not sure the P-Pro / P4 analogy is actually more representative at this point... although it too has certain similarities. The bottom line is that the next generation processor was performing poorly on existing code when compared to the previous generation processor. This happened at the 486 to Pentium transition, and the Pentium to P6 transition. It has now happened again moving from the Pentium III to the Pentium 4. In all cases, it took the software about a year or so to catch up. I know what I'm about to detail is anecdotal, but I think it's a decent example. When I was writing my dissertation, I used a program called "Sigma plot." We had the most recent version for cringe Windows 95. I used the software on 4 or 5 different systems. The most challenging task I performed was creating a 3D plot of mass spec data as a function of temperature. The data sets were large for the day. Depending on the processor used, manipulation of one of these graphs would take anywhere from 10 minutes of time, under 30 seconds. The fastest processor I used was a Pentium 200 (which seemed to scale linearly with the old Pentium 100 I'd used before). The 486's in the lab really choked quite badly on the code... (i.e. the Pentium 100 was more than twice as fast as the 486 50MHz). I'm still anxious to see what SSE2 really does for Willamette. Intel's website implies that it does a LOT, whereas the detractors ignore it completely. It will be interesting to see where the truth actually lies...

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (132611)	4/17/2001 2:42:58 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Jim and all, here's one example showing that Pentium 4 really will shine on the latest software. Back when Pentium 4 1.5 GHz was introduced, here was Tom's Hardware Guide benchmarking it on 3D Studio MAX (revision 2): www4.tomshardware.com Here, it seems Pentium 4 1.5 GHz is rendering slower than a Pentium III 1 GHz. However, as I already posted to Scumbria, here are the results that a friend of mine posted rendering some scenes using a later version of 3D Studio MAX (revision 4): Pentium 4 1.5 GHz: 6-8 minutes (results varied from scene to scene) Pentium III 933 MHz: 13-16 minutes Now this is just one data point, but reading THG's review, you'd think that 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 would run only slightly faster than a 933 MHz Pentium III in professional 3D rendering. But these results clearly show that P4 blows P3 away on the latest software. Makes me wonder why the hardware web sites out there still insist on benchmarking on old, outdated software. Tenchusatsu