Athlon vs Pent-4 Perf.

[hobbr]

We have a computation intensive 16-bit application that we've noticed takes a significant performance hit moving from an 800 Mhz Win2K Pentium-3 Dell to a 1.8Ghz WinXP Pentium-4 Dell (both notebooks). We tested on an HP WinXP notebook with the AMD Athlon at 1.6Ghz and found better than double the performance for the AMD vs the Pentium-4.

Can anyone comment on why the Pentium-4 is so much slower? Is it not as well optimized for numerical computations as the Pentium 3 or the AMD Athlon? Or could the Pentium-4 speed-step simply be brain dead?

 

[Civilized]

p4 laptops suck....I wouldnt doubt if that p4 laptop is running sdram which sucks the life out of the P4...I would feel more justified with a p3 than a p4 on a sdram platform.

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[imgod2u]

Sounds like it was a propriety product you were using. Much of these programs are specifically written for a certain platform and architecture. The Athlon's is a lot closer to the P3's (which it was probably originally written for) than the P4 is. If you have the code in C/Fortran/C++, I suggest downloading (actually buying if you're using it for commercial use) Intel's compiler and using the -qax (I think that's it) tag to have it auto-vectorize and optimize for the P4 platform. You can get a huge increase in performance with the right optimizations. Aces did a review of vector optimization a while ago and with a specific FP program (that was already well optimized for the P4), using the -qax flag for auto-vectorization brought about a 300% increase in performance.

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.

 

[vk2amv]

The P4 doesnt do well with the type of aplications you are talking about. (IE. Basic number crunching apps.) The FPU on the P4 sucks realy bad. You made a mistake geting a P4 for what you are doing. The P4`s only strength is in 3D applications and multimedia. Sorry but you are screwed unless you can replace that laptop.
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