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To: Saturn V who wrote (53517)	8/31/2001 9:05:09 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Saturn: Obviously the thruput will not be 2X of a single theaded system. But an improved thruput of 15%-40% sounds plausible. Today it is impossible for the processor ALU and FP resources to be the the bottleneck For a lot of applications, I certainly agree with you. The problem is that a 3D renderer like Maya uses almost solely double precision floating point and the latency on those instructions is very high - especially on Intel processors (and the P4 doesn't have a fully pipelined FPU). Even the double speed ALU of the P4 is overkill. If this was truly the case, why on earth would Intel do it? The added complexity is enormous and if the rewards are as small as you believe… Well, then, Intel must be just plain stupid, right? ;-) [I should point out that the latter is sarcasm; I do not believe Intel to be stupid] Lastly, I feel obliged to point out a potential inconsistency in your analysis: The most frequent bottleneck is the the memory. Obviously the thruput will not be 2X of a single theaded system. But an improved thruput of 15%-40% sounds plausible. If memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, adding multiple processors (or multiple virtual processors) won't do a bit of good. -fyo