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

To: Ali Chen who wrote (44065)	12/26/1998 9:15:00 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573073

Re: "for a modern superscalar superpipelined microprocessor, if the data delivery time (latency+bandwith) drops below certain limit (I would suspect the length of pipeline is the characteristic factor), furhther increase in L2 speed does not matter - there is enough stuff wating to be executed, and it shadows the processor's bubble due to L1 miss. Is this comprehendable for you?" Ali, let us grant that what you say is correct. The purpose of the Xeon is really to offer larger L2 than would be reasonable for a PII in a signle processor environment. The Xeon is aimed at a multiprocessor system where a faster and larger L2 will not only allow for slightly higher performance but more importantly, greatly reduced bus activity. This reduced bus activity allows for more processors to reside on the bus without saturating the bus. As a result, additional processors will allow nearly unity gain. This is the real reason for Xeons and this is why vendors are happy to pay much higher prices because the high system throughput justifies the higher cost of the Xeons. This is not a Winstone98 or Quake thing, but a TPC-C ideasinternational.com Notice the bottom table. That's the top 10 by price/performance. Every single one of the top 10 is a Intel Xeon system. The vendors aren't stupid Ali, they know value when they see it. EP

To: Ali Chen who wrote (44065)	12/27/1998 12:02:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 1573073

<I do not need to proof anything logically. For the market we are concerned here, the common benchmarks are the proof ... I also could care less of what Xeon is meant to do on not to do. We are talking about the market segment of personal computing.> Oh, I see. The market you are concerned about is the market that only cares about running Microsoft Office and Netscape Navigator on their systems. Guess when AMD releases the K7 servers, they'll be going after a totally irrelevant and useless market. Hey, guess what? That must mean that I work for a totally irrelevant and useless market! Funny how for the personal computing market that you're concerned with, most people aren't going to want a Xeon, or a K7, or even a K6-3 or Pentium II! They'll want either a K6-2 or a Celeron, the commodity low-margin CPUs. <Again here you are having problems with distinction between facts and opinions. Your problem. Be happy that I warned you...> So is what you said to Paul, quoted below, a fact or an opinion? <Intel is afraid of exact side-by-side comparision and the Slot2 is for this reason only. They probably knew that there will be no gain in performance, only the marketing hype. Smart move indeed.> No gain in performance?!? Oh yeah, we all know that we're talking about the retail market, and of course, Xeon shows no advantage in running Microsoft Office now, does it? Well, guess I better tell all those parents lining up to buy the Xeon desktop systems for their children that they're being duped by the Great Satan of the semiconductor industry itself! Thanks to you, I'll be willing to admit that the PC Magazine reference that I made wasn't a valid comparison of Xeon vs. Pentium II on desktop systems. Will you be willing to admit that the full-speed L2 cache on the Xeon shows a definite performance benefit for servers and high-end workstations? If not, please tell me why not, and try not to insert any stupid references towards "marketing hype" or "conspiracy" that you normally associate with Intel. After all, we want to stick to the facts here, no? Tenchusatsu