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To: Joe NYC who wrote (85831)	7/25/2002 11:14:39 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Another nice catch by the a Aces poster, Ken: aceshardware.com From the Windows .NET Server RC1 Review on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite: "But getting the 64-bit products out there is an important step for Microsoft, because that market will someday surpass the 32-bit products. "Eventually everything will be 64-bit," Brian Valentine, the Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Windows Division told me. "The computing world will move there over time. But it's going to take many, many years." The next Windows Server version--code-named Longhorn--will include support for Intel's 64-bit Itanium family, of course, but it will also support 2-4 other 64-bit platforms, including AMD's Opteron, said Brian Valentine. "We will only support high volume 64-bit platforms," he said, alluding to problems Microsoft had supporting alternative architectures such as the MIPs and PowerPC on NT 4. "We will support them fully with key enterprise applications. There may be a slight lag time after the x86-64 release [of these applications], but we will support [the new platforms]." Valentine wouldn't elaborate on which 64-bit platforms Microsoft was currently evaluating. So it looks like the support will be in Longhorn, which is what I was afraid of when AMD posted this FAQ about 3 months ago. amd.com Joe

To: Joe NYC who wrote (85831)	7/25/2002 11:54:24 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

Re: Take a look at this Thanks for the link to a great post. Regards, Dan

To: Joe NYC who wrote (85831)	7/26/2002 12:51:56 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 275872

Joe, Re: "The coincidences are starting to add up." There are no coincidences, Joe. All you have to do is look at the applications used in the benchmark. All this time, you are trying to draw conclusions about the benchmark itself, without examining the applications that make up the benchmark. IMO, there isn't much you can do to "fake" results from a chosen set of applications. The best that Bapco can do is chose the applications that Intel has optimized for their own processors. Look at the set of applications that SysMark 2002 uses in its test suite: Adobe Photoshop® 6.01 Adobe Premiere® 6.0 Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1 Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 and Macromedia Flash 5 We already know that many Photoshop filters have been optimized for the Pentium 4. And I can tell you that both Dreamweaver and Flash have both received extensive Intel optimizations. macromedia.com Despite the myths that go around about the Microsoft Media encoder, I doubt that Intel still gets a significant advantage in this version of that software, since it includes AMD's 3DNow optimizations. But as you can see, the individual applications are favorable to Intel processors, not the benchmark itself. As for the office section of the benchmark, you get the following application list: Microsoft Word 2002 Microsoft Excel 2002 Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 Microsoft Outlook 2002 Microsoft Access 2002 Netscape Communicator® 6.0 Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v.5 WinZip 8.0 McAfee VirusScan 5.13. If anything, most of these applications are likely to favor AMD processors over Intel, and that's mostly due to the Microsoft Office suite not being optimized for Intel Architecture. However, there are some exceptions. Dragon Naturally Speaking was a featured application when the Pentium 4 was first released, and Intel put a lot of optimizations into it. Winzip has also favored Intel processors when tested alone in other benchmarks. So again, I have a feeling that the benchmark itself is legit. The applications themselves favor Intel processors. While you can argue whether or not this is intentional, there's no clear way to tell. I won't confront your speculation, but I think you are mistaken to blame the benchmark itself. wbmw