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To: damniseedemons who wrote (13909)	11/5/1997 9:29:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 24154

Sal; It looks like they will make more money if people buy than not. They will get the profit on 500,000 chips that people would otherwise have never bought anyway, (about $100,000,000) for only $1,500,000 plus their own fees. I suspect that there will be few buyers, as most people will leave the working thing alone. Will the numbers of those who take the option be listed?? Bill

To: damniseedemons who wrote (13909)	11/5/1997 11:18:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Sal, we're talking about different things here, I don't know what was going on with the Pentium SPECmarks and hadn't noticed that story. SPEC is really a good benchmark, as benchmarks go, the programs in it are too big to play many tricks with. I don't know how or why Intel got overly optimistic results on this, it may have been an honest mistake. The thing I was refering was much longer ago, and had to do with a pretty lame benchmark. The benchmark had a strcpy in it, and the trick was to have the compiler do an 8 byte memory move, using floating point registers, instead of a more general routine. This was on the i860, a sort of oddball microprocessor that had usual RISC memory alignment requirements. The dhrystone optimization wouldn't work for any normal C program, since C strings aren't aligned, but you could argue (somewhat weaselishly) that it was ok in the dhrystone case. As for the overdrive rebate from Intel, my impression is that the overdrive processors aren't a very good deal to start out with, but it sounds like one of these bogus class action things anyway. As for the Sun story, reported also in Sun responds to Java accusations , news.com , they may have done something stupid there, but it's a beta tool kit and if one trick could through off the benchmark by that much, it's not a good benchmark. Dhrystone wasn't either. Cheers, Dan.