Pentium 4 pros and cons

[gaffo]

A lot of the benchmarks you see are memory bandwidth dependant - specfp2000 is half memory and half fpu. whatever happened to benchmarks that stress fpu only (with the 1-cache). I'm thinking were gonna see more fpu benchmark FUD here soon. JC's site has a lot of non-bandwidth-ram benches. A guy named Tim Wilkins has two-three of them. A relavent site is http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/1519/ --- a benchmark called molecular dynamics is used and all data fits into 1-cache and fpu (so memory bandwith is irrelavant - therefore each chips fpu alone is stressed - a a fair comparison possible). The athlon beats p-4 two to one.

[zephyr]

There's been a lot of talk about the lack of MMX/SIMD software on this thread so I thought that I'd add my 2 cents.

The reason there are so few apps that use mmx or simd is that you have to program in assembler in order to use mmx or simd. The excetion to this is the Intel compiler that provides mmx/simd primitives in C/C++ but hardly anyone uses Intel's compiler. What's more, Microsoft has been a huge slacker concerning simd. They only recently added inline assembler support for simd.

[Arcadian]

Originally posted by zephyr:
There's been a lot of talk about the lack of MMX/SIMD software on this thread so I thought that I'd add my 2 cents.

The reason there are so few apps that use mmx or simd is that you have to program in assembler in order to use mmx or simd. The excetion to this is the Intel compiler that provides mmx/simd primitives in C/C++ but hardly anyone uses Intel's compiler. What's more, Microsoft has been a huge slacker concerning simd. They only recently added inline assembler support for simd.

It was my understanding that Microsoft's VC++ has MMX built into it, and that SIMD (if it isn't already there) will be added soon. Usually, Intel's compiler enhansements filter down to Microsoft's compilers as well. In addition, I believe there are a lot more developers than you may think that use Intel's compilers.

[Humus]

Originally posted by Arcadian:
It was my understanding that Microsoft's VC++ has MMX built into it, and that SIMD (if it isn't already there) will be added soon. Usually, Intel's compiler enhansements filter down to Microsoft's compilers as well. In addition, I believe there are a lot more developers than you may think that use Intel's compilers.

MSVC has support for MMX in inline assembler but does not generate MMX code itself. To get inline assembler support for 3dnow and sse you need to download and install msvc service pack 4 (126MB) and also a special processor pack.

[gaffo]

Arcadian - i was right! the x87 is poor. Go to acehardware and see the finest reveiw yet! x87 is still the fpu standard - MDK-2, microstation, povray - all show the p-4 at 60-percent speed of k-7 . They say racing games and flight sims are not x87 based - racing may be true, but flight sims have no sse support. Only video encoding and quake-3 performed well - and mostly due to suppoir memory, not sse. When DDR-333-400 mhz come out the k-7 will win all benchmarks.

[Arcadian]

Originally posted by gaffo:
Arcadian - i was right! the x87 is poor. Go to acehardware and see the finest reveiw yet! x87 is still the fpu standard - MDK-2, microstation, povray - all show the p-4 at 60-percent speed of k-7 . They say racing games and flight sims are not x87 based - racing may be true, but flight sims have no sse support. Only video encoding and quake-3 performed well - and mostly due to suppoir memory, not sse. When DDR-333-400 mhz come out the k-7 will win all benchmarks.

Yes, Gaffo. I will admit that your prediction ended up prooving more true. Without optimizations, the Pentium 4 floating point does seem pretty poor. However, if SPECfp2000 is any indicator of how the Pentium 4 will perform with SSE/SSE-2 enhansements, then I think we can see pretty dramatic score increases. Not like the 5% that MMX gave, but rather som serious 20%-30% improvements. So the jury is still out on the Pentium 4 floating point, except that the x87 without optimization does indeed underperform.

[Angelus]

Arcadian (or anyone else ofcourse)

I'm very interested in learning more about the discussed subject and other technology related subjects.

You seem to be very well informed, can you point me to resources on the net were I can learn more?

Thanx

------------------
'There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers'

[Arcadian]

Originally posted by Angelus:
Arcadian (or anyone else ofcourse)

I'm very interested in learning more about the discussed subject and other technology related subjects.

You seem to be very well informed, can you point me to resources on the net were I can learn more?

Thanx

Well, the first place I'd recommend is right here.

You can learn a lot by speaking to others who have experience in the field. There are other forums I'd recommend as well, including the general forums on www.aceshardware.com .

I would also recommend a web page by Paul DeMone called www.realworldtech.com .

However, you must remember that most of the opinions out there are just opinions. Don't believe everything you read, because a lot of it is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). Try to get a general idea from a lot of people's opinions, and then you can form some of your own. Good luck, and if you have any questions, feel free to post in this Highly Technical Forum here, and I'll be sure to read it.

[Spank_Me_Hard]

P4. Pffft! Yea right, like anybody will buy those!

[Geforce255]

P4. Pffft! Yea right, like anybody will buy those!

What could possibly posses you to dig up this relic of a thread?

[James]

What could possibly posses you to dig up this relic of a thread?

It was mentioned in the off topic thread about the greatest moments in Sharky Forums history.