What do you guys thing about the P4

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 12:51:49PM -0400, Scott Shealy wrote:

> I know most people on this list right now seem to prefer the Athlon.  I
> agree that the Athlon FPU kicks the P4's butt.

The Athlon FPU kicks butt on normal floating point. But if you get a
compiler which can actually compile for the P4's SSE-extended FPU, the
P4 kicks butt. Compare the SPECfp benchmarks.

> On the other hand the stream
> benchmarks for the P4 with the RAMBUS memory subsystem are very
> impressive(almost 2.5 time faster than an ATHLON w/ PC133...

Right. And even if you consider DDR, the P4 will still be superior.
That's not because Rambus beats DDR, that's because the P4 has a wide
memory subsystem, like most Alpha memory systems.

> So my question is would any of you build a P4
> cluster if your application was bottlenecked by the memory subsytem.(ex.
> Fluid Dynamics)?

Yes, IF I could get the right compiler. I hear that the Intel compiler
is in beta-test for Linux. It should have the features you need. But
I haven't run into anyone who says, "I have it and it sucks/rocks!"

-- g