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Subject: Re: How good is AMD K-7 Athlon for computer programs?

Author: Alain Lyrette

Date: 15:07:59 09/11/99

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On September 11, 1999 at 04:47:18, Baldomero Garcia, Jr. wrote:

>Every once in a while the topic of computer processors shows up.
>Well, I was just looking at the "computer shopper" and they were talking about
>the K-7 Athlon, from AMD.  It looks like the 600 MHZ Athlon is faster than the
>PIII 600 MHZ.  Independent testing from a video game magazine seemed to confirm
>that point of view.
>
>Has anybody had a chance to use computer programs with this processor?
>It definitely seems interesting.
>btw, there is also a 650 MHZ version of the Athlon too, but I'm not sure it's
>that big a jump from the 600 MHZ.
>
>Baldo.
Well as you know,the improvement seen in the Athlon over the pentium relies
mainly in the floating point domain;since chess programming has absolutely
nothing to do with fpu the Athlon is a bit of a let down.Sure it's about 10%
faster than it's intel rival in integer but so was the k6-3.Of course the Athlon
as already reach the speed of 650mhz while the k6-3 is limited at 450mhz for
now.That would be good for a 30-40 elo improvement but not more.So the k7 is
certainly no breakthrough for chess programming.But if you like to play  3D
games too the thing screams.....



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