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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer who wrote (34993)	7/23/1998 2:19:00 PM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573092

Elmer, <..provide the data that proves you wrong.> There is nothing in this world that can prove me wrong on this subject. There might be only misunderstanding (or unwilling to learn) on your part, or my limited ability to explain the point. I will try again. Your mistake is that are using an inappropriate example. First, we are talking here about the mass desktop market, where typical applications are Word, spreadsheets, games, scheduler, net browsing/email, easy-CAD home design, etc. These applications have certain "affinity" of data they work with, so the desktop systems are designed with appropriate size of L2 cache that fits these data sets and is economical enough. For this typical application workload, the system cache size determines how many memory references will miss that cache. Only these misses contribute to the time wasted in access to external DRAM and determine the difference between 66MHz and 100MHz DRAM/SDARM timing. Now, you picked up the SPECfp95 benchmark. As you might be aware, this benchmark uses examples of most challenging scientific calculations like shallow water and Navier-Stokes equations, turbulence modeling and weather prediction, quantum chemistry and Maxwell's equations. Those are hardly the applications people are running at home. One of the problem with the SPECfp apps is that they require either huge memory that does not fit any reasonable cache, or their data sets have very poor address locality. All this results in excessive L2 misses that must go to main memory and stall CPU for many bus clocks. And since only this portion of run-time is affected by changes in the bus speed, you see some speedup. Actually, why don't you pick SPECint? Winstone98? BAPCO sysmark? In conclusion, the desktop mass-market computers are not designed for applications from the SPECfp95 suite, and inappropriate use of a PC does not prove me wrong. What do you think, if you decide to hit a nail, which device will be better, Xeon or K6? I bet AMD will lose :-)