Re: ARTICLE: Memory bandwidth

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Fri Apr 13 2001 - 19:15:17 MDT


I didn't even read the article yet, but I have read about the P4 quite a
bit. I don't think it is really appropriate to draw conclusions based on
comparing it to P3 since they are radically different, and IMO the P4 is
a botched design. They were trying for something really amazing with it,
but a lot got gutted out of the design resulting in a very unbalanced
CPU. In many benchmarks for instance a slower clocked P3 would beat a P4.

James Rogers wrote:
>
> By fortuitous coincidence, this article was just posted on Slashdot.
>
> http://www.inqst.com/articles/p4bandwidth/p4bandwidthmain.htm
>
> Among other things, it basically says that Intel's architecture has hit the
> memory wall. Huge increases in clock speed appear to be having no
> substantial effect on computational performance (e.g. <5%); all relative
> improvements between the P3 and P4 scale almost exactly with the
> differences in effective memory bandwidth between the chips, particularly
> for computational problems that are much larger than the cache
> size. Plenty of benchmarks and comparative data between the P3 and P4 for
> those interested and another data point regarding the seriousness of this
> particular problem.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -James Rogers
> jamesr@best.com

-- 
Brian Atkins
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.intelligence.org/


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:36 MDT