CPU Performance Overview Q1/1999

E - FPU Performance

It is pretty much tradition that Tom's Hardware Guide is using 3D StudioMax for FPU-benchmarking. 3D rendering is one of the fields where some real FPU power is required unless you want to wait days for the rendering of your scenes.

This chart is not too different to the Quake2-chart. K6-2 has still got a hard time against any 6th -generation Intel CPU when it comes to pure FPU performance.

Summary

It is certainly true that most of us would have loved to see AMD's K6-3 kicking Intel's butt in this comparison and that includes me too. However, the K6-3 seems to be farer away than it seemed at the end of last year. So we should be fair and congratulate Intel on a job well done. The new Celerons are performing very well. We still have the bitter taste of Intel's new overclock-protection and the cheesy 'ZX-66' chipset in our mouth though and this is certainly another reason why none of us will embrace Intel for the release of Celeron 366 and 400. Nevertheless are those new CPUs offering one highly important thing: very high computing power for very little money. And that brings me back to AMD. Without Advanced Micro Devices we would never have come to this situation, so let's thank them for giving Intel a tough competition and let's hope that K6-3 will be out soon.