Re: Print to SHR

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Mar 8, 4:18 am, "Payton Byrd" <plb...@bellsouth.no.spam.net> wrote:

> No, Core 2 is way beyond the efficiency level of Athlon, go read the real-world benchmarks <http://www.tomshardware.com>. PowerPC has never been at the processing efficiency of the Intel processors.  Just because PowerPC can run X instructions compared to Y instructions on Intel is irrelevant when a job requires 300X for every 50Y.  RISC is dying, at least in the high-performance market.  Sun is keeping it alive through massive parallelism, but as Intel and AMD catches up to the levels of Parallelism used by Niagara, RISC will become more and more marginalized.  From a pure efficiency standpoint nothing is even close to Itanium in per-thread performance and Intel is hell-bent on getting that performance into X86-64.

And then wrote:

> You're sounding very biased against Intel and unrealistic about both Moore's Law and Intel's products.  Moore's Law has nothing to do with increasing clock speed, and everything to do with enabling more powerful CPU's through better utilization of the space provided in a relatively-sized slice of semiconductor.  If you don't think that Intel's not doing a great job of pushing the envelope then you aren't paying attention.  Right now they're spanking everyone else in the CPU industry through sheer engineering prowess.  I challenge you to find any PC that can outrun a 2.8 GHZ Core 2 Duo, even in a single threaded application.  The only chance would be to take an Athlon FX-62 and put it under extreme nitrogen cooling to over clock it to about 4.5 ghz.

:-) If what you're referring to in the efficiency stakes is
performance per watt, I'd agree. However the real world benchmarks of
which you speak, being media encoding, playing games, actually only
show the superiority of the Intel vector processing unit which has
almost half the CPI of the AMD unit. The raw integer speed is also
better, but I'd hardly call it earth shattering.

Of course when we look at other 'real world' benchmarks, like running
web servers, databases, etc. The phenomenal memory bandwidth and cache-
sharing abilities of the AMD microarchitecture (thanks to coherent
hypertransport) become evident.

Of course, these things tend to run in cycles. I'd imagine there's an
engineering team at AMD figuring out how to build an SSE unit that
trounces the Core2, and another tweaking the instruction pipeline to
tip the scales the other way. I actually think your 'faith' in Intel
is a little misplaced, given the grand difference in the levels of
sophistication between the two architectures in terms of memory
interfacing and inter-core communication. I think they've (again) put
too much emphasis on single-thread performance, and too little effort
into a genuine scalable architecture. OTOH, the Kryptonite
architecture still has a massive lead in memory bandwidth and inter-
core communication, and doubtless a lot of life left in it.

That said, I'm not a 'fan' of any particular provider. If I was buying
a new PC tomorrow, I'd grab a Core2, as anyone who feels that price-
performance ratio is the best comparator would. The best thing about
Core2 for me, is that now that Intel is 'back in the game' we can all
enjoy watching them try to outdo eachother, and reap the rewards.

Matt