Athlon Benchmarks Out

|jasper| writes "on AMD's home page they now have Athlon processors benchmarked against P3 550.. Probably still biased.. but its something " They claim that integer performance is slightly faster, while floating point and 3d is significantly faster (at the same clock speed)

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What it all means

[JoeBuck]

While the distorted way the graphs are drawn is a form of cheating, the SPEC benchmarks are industry standard and very hard to cheat, because the rules are very tight, so the underlying numbers can be counted on: the new processor is a hair better than the PIII for integer, with a more significant gain for floating point. Of course this doesn't mean that your floating point program will run 50% faster, but as benchmarks go SPEC is about the best available.

The real question, though, is whether AMD will be able to manufacture this processor with sufficient yield to be able to meet demand or make money. In the past, the fact that they haven't been able to do this is the primary reason that AMD has lost money in recent years. If they can't convince the PC manufacturers that they have their past problems beat, no one will do a deal with them and the speed of the processor will not matter.