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.

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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (59969)	5/28/1999 8:43:00 PM
From: RDM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572973

I bought a K6-III 450 Mhz for $220 and received it last week. They have plenty in stock.

To: Paul Engel who wrote (59969)	5/29/1999 1:05:00 AM
From: RDM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572973

<Without optimizations, what do you think the K7 FPU speed will be vis-a-vis the Pentium III ?> I believe that we will find that the K7 FPU will run 20% faster with standard off the shelf programs. These have been optimized typically for the PII (Pentium Pro mode on some compilers). I am perhaps the only one on the thread to presently use a dual Pentium II processor computer (400 Mhz)and an application for very fast floating point. A group of students at your alma mater (MIT) studied the K7 for some time and came up with a 25% advantage for the K7 running Pentium II code. I am guessing when I estimate 20%, but I am serious. There was a first year graduate class at Stanford that did a cycle counting type of analysis, but they did not seem to have an accuracte description of the machine. There have reports from Germany that the 550 Mhz K7 runs Lightwave 25% faster than 550 Mhz PIII. Light wave is a ray tracing program that uses extensive double precision vector multiplication operations that are very similiar to what I am interested in. I do not think that for applications other than scientific modelling the FPU speed is significant at all. I would think that you would want to point out the the integer performance may be only 5%-10% greater than the PIII and this is what the major markets cares about. By the way, I have been told that the support chips for Dual K7 processors will be out by December. I you do not like the heat, stay out of the K7 kitchen. I agree with you that if you had to wait with a 20% slower machine for six months and then only catch the PIII with specially compiled code that would be disappointing. However, I believe that you get a small gain now and a bigger one later.