interesting Athlon/P4 discussion from FreeBSD-Q-l

[Greg Lindahl]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 08:11:58PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:

> the P4 is not exceptional
> when running real code in-cache; this is why on most benchmarks
> other than Stream, recent Athlons beat P4's quite handily.

Like SPEC2000fp, for example?

Advanced Micro Devic  Gigabyte GA-7DX Motherboard, 1.33GHz     445
Intel Corporation  Intel D850GB motherboard(1.5 GHz, Pe        558

If you compile your own codes, and you can get the Intel compiler,
than SPEC2000fp is probably a lot more relevant than the numerous
benchmarks where old compilers were used. This is similar to the
situation with the Pentium Pro, which was terrible on 16-bit windows
code, but great on 32-bit Linux code. The press said bad things, but
Linux users were happy.

> and that's why AMD is having such an awsome time in the market now,
> and why Intel is cutting prices so dramatically on the P4.

That's true in the overall market. I thought this was the Beowulf
mailing list? Do you think that a majority of beowulf users can
re-compile their own codes, or do they use shrink-wrapped binaries
from vendors who are unwilling to re-compile for the P4?

-- g