What do you guys thing about the P4

Mark Hahn hahn at coffee.psychology.mcmaster.ca
Wed Apr 4 17:50:56 PDT 2001


> My DDR Athlons aren't a match for a P4 when you look at stream numbers.
> Around half what the P4 can do. 

http://brain.mcmaster.ca/~hahn/ram.gif
you can see that although rdram has dramatically decreased in price,
it's still ridiculously overpriced (compared to PC133), even if you factor in
the full benefit to Stream.  in other words, Stream is an upper bound on 
the benefit you can possibly extract from the P4's only real innovation,
it's hardware prefetcher.


> I don't see your logic for comparing a dual Athlon to a single P4. Basically
> you make it worse for the Athlon per cpu. The P4 outruns almost any cpu out
> there when you look at the stream numbers. Same is true for SPEC2000. Just
> have to use Intel compilers. I'm hoping the ones for Linux happen "real soon now".
> Their web site says March, 2001.

				cint2000
compaq es40 6/866		544
athlon 1.33, amd760 pc2100	539
intel P4/1.5 i850 2xPC800	536
athlon 1.30  kt133 pc133	491
intel PIII/1.0, i840 2xpc800	462

				cfp2000
compaq es40 6/866		658
intel P4/1.5 i850 2xpc800	558
athlon 1.33, amd760 pc2100	445
athlon 1.30  kt133 pc133	374
intel PIII/1.0, i840 2xpc800	335

it's a shame they don't have kt133a results, since "enthusiast" sites
report that keeping the FSB synchronous with the dram bus results in a 
nontrivial performance improvement.  I'm guessing it would score
pretty impressively, around 410/540.





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