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

To: that_crazy_doug who wrote (74184)	3/11/2002 11:52:34 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Doug: The K6-3/450 smoked all other x86s in server work which does very little floating point. RDBMS servers liked it because it was very fast with their uses of BCD arithmetic and string handling. The combination of larger L1, full speed L2 and larger L3 (64KB, 256KB, 1024KB in my system) was faster than even AMD suspected (they were surprised that the L3 boosted scores by 5 to 10% depending on the application). It was the king on Linux kernel compile at the time. Pete

To: that_crazy_doug who wrote (74184)	3/11/2002 5:47:20 PM
From: rsi_boy	Respond to of 275872

Actually I'm not really arguing with you. Intel/AMD positions were reversed with the K-6 2. AMD processors performed well in floating point applications only if the software was optimized for 3-D now. Intel at the time had no special instructions and Pentium processors were great at general-purpose floating point. 3-D now was able to give the K-6 to a boost of up to 30% (which says more about how bad the floating point unit was rather than how miraculous 3D now was) in applications like quake, putting it roughly on par with Intel processors. Ironically, at the time AMD fans held up quake benchmarks as the best/only way to measure gaming performance. Intel advocates protested that this application was uniquely optimized for AMD's special instructions and that the Pentium 2 was better general processor. How times have changed...