Author: Pavel Blokhine
Date: 05:46:35 04/21/03
Go up one level in this thread
On April 21, 2003 at 07:19:50, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >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 That's what i thought too. And according to Mig Greengard, even a 10 Ghz or more computer would only see 3 or more moves deeper while running the the tops programs of today. So i don't expect the Opteron to be anything revolutionary.
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