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

To: tcmay who wrote (55540)	9/16/2001 2:55:47 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

The big surprise came when I ran the same Softimage XSI benchmarks that I had run on the dual 1.7GHz Xeon workstation that I reviewed previously. I was totally blown away by the results. This single processor unit, clocked at a considerably lower speed, was almost -- and I mean real close -- as fast as the other machine. When I showed the results to the people around the office, no one believed them. There must have been something wrong, we all thought. But I ran the tests over and over and this Polywell workstation kept turning out the same results. In fact, everything that I ran on this machine just plain screamed. Now, there's either something funny with the math I learned in school or there's something really special about the way this machine is configured and how the Athlon chip and DDR memory work. After all, the tests I was running take full advantage of multiple processors and the dual Xeon had two 1.7GHz chips. So, two times 1.7 versus one time 1.333 equals?... OK, back to kindergarten. Which one is faster, a bicycle or a motorcycle? It doesn't make any sense, does it? It is common knowledge that the latest generation AMD Athlon chips are very fast. Still, it is not easy to admit that they are that much faster than Intel's Pentium 4s. Luckily I found other independent benchmarks that confirmed the results that I had obtained, rating the 1.333 GHz Athlon chip 84% faster than a 1.5GHz Intel P4 and 97% faster than a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. Add to that the fact that Polywell uses very fast memory and configures their systems extremely well and you have a computer that runs real life applications like a race horse on a few espressos..... ....As for the overall performance, all I can say is that we have been so blown away by the Athlon chip that a colleague of mine and I both have purchased 1.4 GHz Athlon-based systems. Even our Mac purist staffer likes the Athlon and has since been questioning why Apple doesn't abandon the Motorola in favor of AMD. I have heard from a few software vendors that optimizing their applications for Intel's Pentium 4 processor results in considerable speed gains. Therefore, comparing an optimized application running on a P4 to the same application running on the Atlhon may take away some of the speed difference. On the other hand, I was also told that optimizing an application to run on the Atlhon would produce a similar speed increase. Therefore, it appears that AMD chips would still have an advantage over Intel's in the end. In the practical world, however, we must run the applications that are currently available and, without any optimizations, the Athlon CPU is definitely running circles around the Pentium 4. In fact, I recently found out that a developer of a very high end 3D program, which I shall keep anonymous, is recommending the Athlon as the preferred CPU to run their processor-intensive application. animationartist.com