Hi,
At 10:29 AM 12/2/2000 -0800, xqrpa wrote:
>Very discouraging at first blush. Could you give us a brief summary of the
>the recoding possibilities that might take adavntage of the new features?
>
>Seems a shame that the much improved P4 memory bandwidth serves for
>naught.
I was rather pleased with the results. As noted earlier, the latencies are
high
for the regular FPU. The SSE2 instructions should result in more floating
point operations per clock cycle.
The memory bandwidth is for naught! Prime95 was designed with a 32 byte
cache line in mind. The L2 cache of the P4 has 128 byte cache lines. Thus,
prime95 is often using only 25% of the bytes the P4 has fetched into
the L2 cache.
While speculating at this point is dangerous. I suspect an optimized prime95
will be more than twice as fast as an Athlon 700.
> The chip and the mobos listed seem outlandishly expensive, too.
>Double ratbite.
I can't help you there! The best bang for your buck today is an Athlon system.
I would wait until next summer or fall before purchasing a P4. The clock
rate will be
higher and support for DDR SDRAM may be available. Also, the shrink to a 0.13
micron process may be complete by then. If upgradability is important to
you, be aware
that todays P4 motherboards are a "dead end". Future P4 chips will not
work in them.
Regards,
George
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