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Re: non-pentium processors

Curt Sampson
Sun, 18 Oct 1998 15:03:53 -0700 (PDT)

On Sat, 17 Oct 1998, Dave Martindale wrote:

> It's my impression that Pentium floating-point performance is still better
> than the non-Intel competitors. My wife sometimes fires up simulation jobs
> in Matlab that run for hours - mostly matrix arithmetic, probably all
> floating point. That would be a good reason to care about FP performance.

Well, only the Intel-compatable `non-Intel competitors.' :-) If
you really care about FP, you'd be much better off with a RISC
chip.

As an example, a Alpha PC164SX motherboard, with a 533 MHz CPU and
a meg of cache, offers a SPECint95 of 12.4. This is darn near the
12.7 SPECint98 of a 333 MHz Pentium II on an Intel DK440LX motherboard
with 1/2 MB of cache. However, the Intel has a SPECfp95 of only
9.25, whereas the Alpha has a SPECfp95 of 16.1. It's the general
case that, with an Intel and Alpha of similar integer performance,
you'll get one and a half to twice the FP performance from the
Alpha.

cjs

--
Curt Sampson  <



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