[KLUG Members] Re: Yo! -- K6 I/O = Pentium I/O != PPro-P4 I/O ~= Athlon I/O != Opteron I/O

[Bryan J. Smith]

Quoting Adam Tauno Williams <adam@morrison-ind.com>:
> One tip is to change the window border theme to 'Crux', or something
> other than blue-curve.  In my cubicle I still use a ~300MHz
> AMD-Ah!-Floating-Point-Operations!-Run-For-The-Hills! box.

<off-topic>
???  God, yet another uninformed bigot.  ;->

The AMD floating point unit (FPU) in the K6 is actually _faster_ than the Intel
Pentium FPU.  It's just not pipelined, which means it runs "Pentium
Hacked^H^H^H^H^H^HOptimized" software (i.e. software that uses a workaround to
address the "slower than 486" ALU integer loads) runs less than optimal on it. 
E.g., if Quake was released in an "unhacked" version, written to the 386 ISA, it
would run faster on K6 systems than even the Pentium Optimized one on a Pentium.

Of course most people don't know this, and ass-u-me the AMD K6 had a slow FPU
(Intel has _always_ had the _worst_ FPU design, CISC or, especially, RISC).
</off-topic>

> It is just fine as about the only thing I do locally is some file
> management and updating a few spreadsheets.  But after installing
> RH8.0 GNOME windows C-r-a-w-l-e-d.

How much memory?  I recommend 192MB for NT 5.x (aka 2000/XP) as well as Linux
with Gnome/KDE.

> But as long as I didn't overlay or move any windows it was fine,

Then that's definitely memory.

> so I though it might be calculating the gradients and curves in
> the theme.  Once I switched the window border theme to Crux I was
> back to my snappy GNOME 2 feel.  This probably doesn't effect
> workstations with real (i.e. non-AMD) CPUs.

Is this a joke list or something?  Intel _lost_ the x86 performance game _long_
ago.  Why?  Intel _though_ IA-64 would be on the desktop by now, so the stopped
innovating the x86 back in 1992, with the Pentium Pro.

The only way they "maintain" it now is by pushing their "lossy math" SIMD
instructions, selling people on "high GHz" as well as "Rambus" signaling
technologies which are _not_ a 1:1 ratio to AMD or SDRAM, respectively.  AMD
just laughs now, writes a little microcode for the new instructions, and
leverages its  vastly superior FPU in the Athlon.

Furthermore, you are talking about _memory_ performance, _not_ CPU.  The K6 was
for the _Intel_Pentium_ platform, which is _not_ equivalent to the PPro-P4 in
memory throughput.  Don't forget that.  Once AMD "took control" of the platform
with Athlon, benefiting from the Digital Alpha bus, things changed.

With x86-64, AMD now "takes control" of the x86 architecture, with even more
technologies that Intel has licensed!  (not just x86-64, but HyperTransport as
well!).  Or what part of the various announcements (like Cray's?!?!?!) did you
_not_ understand?  ;-P

But I'll spare the list of anything else.  I mean, what do I know?  I only
worked in the semiconductor field with several, former Intel engineers.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.             Contact Info:  http://thebs.org
A+/i-Net+/Linux+/Network+/Server+  CCNA CIWA CNA SCSA/SCWSE/SCNA
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