Tyan Tiger & non-MP Athlons

[Mark Hahn]

> really have a clue to what extent 3D rendering is memory bound. I would
> strongly suspect that it is, because it *consumes* lots of RAM. I also

but *how* it uses lots of ram is the critical thing.

> just saw at Benchmark at
> http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020117/p4_3000-08.html
> which suggests that the Athlon's performance with 3D rendering is rather
> pathetic compared to the PIV

well, on lightwave, that's sure how it looks.  but quake is rendering too
(the opengl benchmarks), and there AMD is competitive.  but an alternative
explanation is simply that lightwave is well-tuned for the P4.
it's not obvious that rendering would be especially well-suited for the P4's
rather uneven performance profile (good bandwidth, fair-to-poor latency,
big mispredict penalty, etc.)

also, I still can't figure out which configurations were P4/rdram and 
which were P4/pc2700.  note that all Athlon configs were using pc2100...