Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 04:19:50 04/21/03
Go up one level in this thread
On April 21, 2003 at 05:05:08, Aaron Gordon wrote: >The same way a Celeron 1GHz, P3-933MHz or 900MHz Athlon is faster than a Pentium >4 1.5GHz. MHz isn't everything. Pentium 4's were made with only 1 thing in mind, >marketing. Make a chip with high MHz so people will think it's faster. To get >those high MHz numbers they had to gimp the CPU, which is why the Pentium 4's >are ridiculously slow MHz for MHz. > >In some applications it has the IPC (instructions per cycle) of a 486. I don't >know about you, but I upgraded from a 486 a long time ago.. :) What part of the P4 is gimped? According to SPECint, http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/index.jsp?b=0&s=2&v=2&if=0&r1f=2&r2f=0&m1f=0&m2f=0&o=0&o=1 AXP only has 15% more IPC than a P4. Also notice that the AXP has dramatically lower IPC than MIPSs, PA-RISCs, POWERs, and Alphas. Surely you will argue that AMD sacrificed IPC for clock speed for a net gain in performance. Perfectly legitimate argument, and the same argument one could make for the P4. BTW, while I definitely share your enthusiasm for Opteron, I wouldn't get people's hopes up with talk of blazing speed. Chess programs run mainly in cache, so the on-die memory controller won't help much. Chess programs don't require a ton of inter-processor bandwidth, so HT won't help much. Chess programs may benefit significantly from x86-64 in the future but high-quality x86-64 compilers won't be here for a while. What's left? Some improvements to the core, which may or may not be offset by the higher branch mispredict penalties, and I doubt they'd make up for the 15+% difference in clock speed between the Opteron and the AXP. I expect AMD to ramp up Opteron (and A64) clock speeds quickly, so they will be quite good for computer chess, but this week won't offer anything mind-bending to computer chess enthusiasts. -Tom
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