So what you're saying is that no one should buy a P4? I say I must agree. The brilliance of the Athlon arch is that it runs legacy compiled code faster than Intel processors. To get the architectural speed improvements of the P4, you have to recompile your source code. Are you going to recompile every bit of software you run? So the conclusion is that no one should buy a P4 unless they have an entire distribution compiled for it. The Q3 tests came out smelling like a rose on the P4 because they have a lot of SSE code in them so they will run well on P3s, and at 1.7GHz, there is no way the P4 would get beat by the Athlon running their own instructions at 500MHz faster clock rate.
Be very careful trying to compare compilation times of two different archs. To really do this comparison right, you need to put together cross compilers for each arch. Run the x86 cross compiler on the G4s and the PPC cross compiler on the Athlons. Then compare the numbers and be prepared for a shock. The PPC cross compiler running on the Athlons are likely to smoke the the G4s (as truely cool as those machines are... drool drool) terribly. The integer and logic speed of the Athlons with the DDR memory is mesmerizing.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that no one should buy a P4? I say I must agree. The brilliance of the Athlon arch is that it runs legacy compiled code faster than Intel processors. To get the architectural speed improvements of the P4, you have to recompile your source code. Are you going to recompile every bit of software you run? So the conclusion is that no one should buy a P4 unless they have an entire distribution compiled for it. The Q3 tests came out smelling like a rose on the P4 because they have a lot of SSE code in them so they will run well on P3s, and at 1.7GHz, there is no way the P4 would get beat by the Athlon running their own instructions at 500MHz faster clock rate.
Be very careful trying to compare compilation times of two different archs. To really do this comparison right, you need to put together cross compilers for each arch. Run the x86 cross compiler on the G4s and the PPC cross compiler on the Athlons. Then compare the numbers and be prepared for a shock. The PPC cross compiler running on the Athlons are likely to smoke the the G4s (as truely cool as those machines are ... drool drool) terribly. The integer and logic speed of the Athlons with the DDR memory is mesmerizing.
Check out the Netscape.ad file usually found somewhere in $MOZILLA_HOME ... like, /usr/lib/netscape or whatever. It's got them all listed.