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

To: porn_start878 who wrote (69678)	1/31/2002 3:38:04 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Back on January 8, JC said this: 02/01/08, 1:50pm - Interesting. According to here, Microsoft already released the patch which allows Windows Media Encoder to use SSE instructions with the Athlon XP. As is known, the Athlon XP supports both AMD's 3DNow! instructions and Intel's SSE instructions. WME supports SSE, but the detection routine is a bit wonky: Instead of looking for the cpu flag that tells the system that the cpu supports SSE, the program first makes sure that the cpu is manufactured by Intel and then looks at the SSE flag. Since the two most popular "Content Creation" programs include WME as a major part of their suite, this puts AMD's Athlon XP at a distinct disadvantage to the competition. AMD had released a patch of their own, but many sites (quite rightly) refused to use it until Microsoft incorporated it into their system. According to that post linked above, WME 7.1 uses wmv8dmoe.dll for its encoding. Upgrading to Windows Movie Maker v1.2 in Windows Update will bring in the newer DLL (of the same name) that checks only the SSE flag and not the cpu manufacturer. The two big benchmarks which use WME are SysMark 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2002. After doing this patch, you should see a distinctly measurable improvement in scores for SysMark 2001, and CCWS2k2 probably will also see a boost (it is not totally whether CCWS2k2 is using the older or the newer DLL). I mean to see this DLL thing verified. My father has an Athlon XP (I think it's a 1600+, which runs on a 1.40GHz clock) with one of those IWill XP333 boards, if I recall correctly. I recently ordered CCWinstone2k2 (it's free, save for shipping and handling), and if I get it before my father gets to the Windows Update stage of his install, then I will be able to do a test of the system using the old DLL. I'll then try doing the Windows Update, and I'll run the test again. If the rumours are true, then I'll be able to show you a marked improvement in this processor's performance. According to those who tested with AMD's patch, the usage of SSE instructions with the Athlon XP results in about a 17% performance improvement (as seen at Van's and Anand's) in BapCo's Sysmark 2001 Internet Content Creation subsuite. This results in an overall boost of about nine percent. For comparison, going from an Athlon XP 1700+ to an Athlon XP 2000+, a boost of 200MHz or around 13.6%, brings performance up less than 8% in ICC and roughly 6% overall. [JC, did you ever verify this "Windows Movie Maker" method of enabling SSE on Palomino?] If anybody out there could try the Windows Update thing with Sysmark 2001, I'd be happier. We don't know for certain that the Microsoft fix is identical to the AMD patch (though this is likely). While I'm at it, if anybody out there has an Athlon XP, Athlon MP, or Morgan-based Duron (if you're over 1.00GHz it's probably a safe bet that that's what you've got), and you have a copy of the new CC Winstone, please try to mirror my tests so that I know that I'm not screwing up something trivial. :) ------------- end quote ------------------------- So, there IS an official Microsoft patch, but it apparently isn't included with WME 7.1 unless you also upgrade Windows Movie Maker. Petz