Yesterday i've read that the next-gen AMD cpu will support FULL sse, the end of PIV ?
Also, since there ARE Athlon optimized gcc compiler you might get a real performance boost from recompiling. I don't know about 3DNOW support in linux but it should also provide some substantial performance boost. Not quite as much as SSE/SSE2 but still, 3DNOW!2 aint bad at all. Also take into account that there it's not very likely you'll see any REAL world P4 optimized applications for year(s) to come and SSE might flop just like MMX did in it's own way. Try to make a list of applications that REALLY support MMX (not that much all together) The price for moderate P4 systems might give you a REALLY nice Athlon/AMD system. If you think about it that there's a 266Mhz/DDR platform around the corner for AMD based systems you might want to hang on a little longer, SMP systems coming as well. Taken these will surely surpass the P4 for the first year to come. You also might want to take a GOOD look at this new platform and go for a REAL AMD chipset (though more expensive) because it's faster then VIA's implementation (they AMD/VIA are working on it). Still rather nice though. Like someone allready suggested, take a look at a hardware review site like www.tomshardware.com www.aceshardware.com (major P4 review) www.anandtech.com and many more. Greets, Joris -----Original Message----- From: William T Wilson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: dinsdag 27 maart 2001 21:34 To: Alexander Isacson Cc: debian-user@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Pentium 4 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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
