New Hope For Athlon - The VIA Apollo KX133 Chipset

SPECviewperf 6.1.1 Under Windows 98

All over a sudden Athlon scores a whole lot better and KX133 is faster than Irongate, just as it should be. The strange thing is though, that we should expect an OpenGL-workstation benchmark to run better under NT than under Windows98. I doubt than anyone would use high-end OpenGL-software under Windows98. Puzzled I looked at the Pentium III (Coppermine) scores and started to smell something seriously fishy.

What Does Athlon's OpenGL Performance Under NT Have In Common With An Excellent Munster?

I can't help it, but that really stinks! Coppermine scores higher under NT than under Win98, which is what everybody would expect. It also scores way higher than Athlon under NT, something nobody would expect. Running SPECviewperf under Windows98 (what no sane person would ever do) reveals that Athlon's Win98-scores are not only higher than Coppermine's Win98-scores, they are even higher than some of Coppermine's NT-scores! Athlon's Win98-scores prove that this processor can run OpenGL-software on GeForce very well, but under NT, where those scores are important, Athlon performs miserably. Could it be that somebody who doesn't want Athlon to look good on workstations is trying to make sure that either GeForce's (and thus Quadro's) NT-driver runs really bad as soon as it detects an Athlon-processor, or is there some strange anti-Athlon-software in WindowsNT's latest service pack? Many of you will know that Quadro, a NVIDIA GeForce-chip with 64 MB DDR-memory, is an extremely good high-end OpenGL-performer and will thus sell very well in the workstation area. Making sure that Athlon performs really badly with this graphics card almost means barring Athlon's well-deserved way into the workstation-segment. The SPECviewperf-scores under Windows98 prove that there's certainly no hardware problem between GeForce and Athlon. They also prove that Athlon is actually performing better than Coppermine in OpenGL. The fishy scores under NT raise some serious questions towards NVIDIA, Microsoft and also AMD, since nobody there seems to have noticed this issue early enough.

You see, this is AMD-bully No. 2,345,687. It's exactly what I was talking about in my introduction. Intel seems to pull enough weight that a well performing AMD-product is shut up with some cheesy software. If AMD isn't finally starting to do something about those kinds of issues, the days of this company will be counted.