Re: P4 VS. Athlon

[bob@xxxxxxx]

>Looking to build a new system and was wondering if
>anyone had experience with either the P4 or Athlon and
>Linux?? 

No experience in this here, but there is very broad evidence out
there that the P4 is a turkey (both in terms of performance and
CERTAINLY in terms of price-performance). There are a couple of
LONG articles that explain why (with the beneficial byproduct of
going over the technical history of microprocessors in general and
the Intel line in particular) this is so, and I can be influenced
into looking for the URL and posting it.

The VERY short and snappy on the P4, according to the article, was
thatthe P4 as released was the result of marketing trying to get out
SOMETHING quickly to answer AMD|, and as a result a lot of good 
engineering tricks (barrel shifter, multipath execution, caching)
were left out of the product or shortchanged, resulting in something
that often performs not better than a 200 mHz Pentium MMX. 


The points that Dan Downs makes are quite correct about sofftware is
about right; the reason for this is that it takes a long time for the
compiler writers to exploit better instrction sets in their optimiza-
tion strategies and code generators. The article [not] referenced above
goes into this, too. 

                                                      Regards,
                                                      ---> RGB <---