Re: Will Prescott work on Win64?

"Tony Hill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> As for Intel's "benchmark con" with SSE2, there isn't much of a con.
> Intel and AMD's SSE2 units are VERY similar when run in 32-bit mode
> (in 64-bit mode, AMD doubles the number of SSE/SSE2 registers).  The
> only real difference is that AMD operates their SSE2 unit at 2.0GHz
> (or thereabouts) while the Intel SSE2 units operate at up to 3.2GHz.
> As such, it's not a huge surprise that the Intel version tends to be a
> bit faster.

As George McD has pointed out (IIRC), things come to a screeching halt on
Intel SSE2 when FPU underflows occur, which is what happens too often in
digital audio applications.  In that case, AMD SSE2 is not only better, it's
also faster!

All a part of the tradeoffs Intel made in the P4 microarchitecture to get good
(hell, excellent!) video streaming performance.  You pays yer gelt and you
takes yer choice.

> Of course, things like the integrated memory controller
> and larger cache help AMD out here, but not enough to even out the
> clock difference.  This is quite different from the standard ALUs and
> FPUs, where AMD and Intel have quite different designs with the AMD
> units doing more per clock cycle than the Intel ones.
>
> -------------
> Tony Hill
> hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca