Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (7738)	9/28/1998 5:13:00 PM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Sun, An overclocked 450 mhz celleron A is actually faster than a 450 mhz Pentium 2. Go figure. Intel thinks they can get away with the sleight of hand because they are running the Celeron A with a 66 mhz bus so you can't compare the two chips directly. Reminds me of the good 'ol days when they made a 486 SX by destroying the math coprocessor in the 486 DX chip. The k6-2 is pretty good but ONLY when using the new instructions. Pat

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (7738)	9/28/1998 7:20:00 PM
From: Michael Linov	Respond to of 16960

Well, the K6 has a rather weak (30%+ slower) FPU core. They concentrated their engineering effort on the integer instructions (since that's what the benchmarks use, and few business apps make heavy use of FP). MMX is another intel waste of time. Other than basic saturation arithmetic, and color space conversions, they really aren't useful. The one instruction that might have helped (32x32 multiply) was not implemented under MMX1, so the whole thing is basically a total waste. KNI is another matter... it's cool, but won't be here till 99. Since Intel has added a 128K FULL SPEED CACHE to the 300/333A (vs. the half speed 512K cache on the P2), they've actually screwed themselves over. The quality of the part is also such that most celeron's can run just fine at 450 Mhz (though Intel didn't expect anyone to run them at 100 Mhz bus... only 66). Intel is now trying VERY HARD to prevent people from buying a celeron vs. a P2 (by preventing multiplier overlocking etc.) Anyway, other than the lack of MP support, the celery is currently the world's best computing bargain.