SpecFP and cache

[Greg Lindahl]

> I always thought that Athlons were so much faster in FP than Pentiums,
> until I saw some results for the SpecFP 95 at spec.org.

Those results are hard to understand, because the Intel PIII results include
a new processor, RDRAM, and a compiler which includes pre-fetch
instructions. It so happens that SPEC95FP on processors with relatively
small L2 cache is helped a lot by pre-fetch, but your application may not
show the same effect. SPEC2000 numbers supposedly look pretty different.

As usual: benchmark your codes with the compilers you're going to actually
use.

-- greg