On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Alexander Isacson wrote: > Will I have to recompile all major components in order to get decent > speed with the p4?
Recompiling won't help; there's no P4-optimizing GCC. The P4 is actually respectable at the sort of bit shoveling that characterizes "average" applications - the thing it really sucks at is floating-point. > Whats the best thing to do? Buy an AMD-CPU instead? It depends on how good of a deal you get on the P4. The Athlon is, for general purpose applications, faster than a P4, even at slower clock speeds. However, for anything that uses SSE, the P4 will be faster. Mostly, you will only use SSE for media-related activities - MPEG, MP3 and other media encoding and decoding. The P4 also has a higher memory bandwidth for applications that are demanding on that - mostly media again, but also Quake 3 (for other games it is basically a wash). For practically anything else the Athlon will be faster and require no special treatment.
