EM64T Xeon vs. Athlon 64 under Linux (AMD64)

legrimpeur writes "Anandtech has a nice performance comparison under Linux (AMD64) between the recently introduced 3.6GHz EM64T Xeon processor and an Athlon 64 3500+. It is disappointing to see how the Athlon gets trounced in FPU intensive benchmarks. No memory-bound benchmarks (where the Athlon is supposed to have an edge) are presented, though." Update: 08/09 23:34 GMT by T : As the Inquirer reports, many Anandtech readers take issue with the comparison.

Comments

Re:Math Co-Processor

[crow]

The math co-processor goes all the way back to the original 8086 processor, which could be paird with an 8087 for hardware floating point support. There was also the 80287 for use with the 80286 and the 387 for use with the 386. The 486DX included a built-in math co-processor, but the 468SX did not. I do not believe that there was ever a separate 487 co-processor.

But that's irrelevant to patents. Intel may well have developed some clever implementation of certain key floating-point calculations which they patented. There have undoubtedly been floating-point improvements covered by new patents in every major new x86 release.

The question is which patents are really holding AMD back? Without talking to AMD engineers, we won't get a real answer to that question.

The best improvement to Slashdot so far:

[Dark Lord Seth]

1. Optional: Wipe blood from eyes due to atrocious Slashdot "design", get pretty Mozilla/Firebox bookmarklet to solve it.
2. Click "Preferences" on the left side, if you're logged in.
3. Click "Homepage" at the top.
4. Scroll down to "Exclude Stories from the Homepage".
5. Under the "Authors" header, check "Hemos"
6. Save settings, enjoy Slashdot a little bit more.

Why not work on some real problems?

[lotho brandybuck]

You know, I'd rather see something about how we were working on moving the world away from dependence on petroleum. Just something a little more immediately useful than being able to play quake or watch Brittney Shpeers at a gazillion frames a second. If all the effort that has gone into making phenomenal processors would be shifted into energy independence, we'd breathe cleaner air and not support so much terrorism and war. Maybe Intel could build a couple plants to produce photovoltaics... we're CAPACITY LIMITED on panels now! Sure, it's different than a submicron CPU, and would require different techniques and thinking, but why not?? I think you could build a plant to make FREAKING DIODES for a couple billion dollars. Just my personal rant. I'm not the manufacturing/financing/business leader to do this, but I'd hope somebody is. Is American Industry lead by a bunch of risk averse, non innovative SISSYS now??? I also want a Moon Base. I'm serious.