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I have no idea why I've been posting so much lately. I usually sit in the background and pop up every now and then. Anyway, here's some more info that I thought you Matrox heads would be interested in.
Quoted from John Carmack:
"AMD K7 cpus are very fast.
Some timedemo numbers (a new demo, not comparable to previous scores):
Run at 640*480*16 bit color to emphasise the cpu/driver performance rather than the hardware fill rate.
K7-600 K7-550 PIII-500
TNT2 ultra 16 bit 73.9 68.5 53.8
Voodoo3 3000 16 bit 70.5 65.2 46.0
This is with K7 optimized drivers vs seperate PIII optimized drivers.
There is still wiggle room there in that it is possible that more effort was expended to make the AMD drivers perform better. That is perfectly valid from a consumer's point of view, but muddies the technical CPU comparison. On identical code run on the systems, there was some more interesting data:
On my map processing tools, the K7 was faster than the PIII, but only slightly more so than the reletive clock rate increase. I would guess that this is due to larger data sets that don't fit in cache as well.
On the matrox OpenGL drivers, which have not been optimized very much and(to my knowledge) contain no PIII specific code, the K7 was a LOT faster. The bottom line is that I feel comfortable standing behind the statement that the K7 is faster than the PIII. I will have to wait for some stuff to come out of NDA to provide a more detailed technical analysis.
Architectural cleverness is all well and good, but if AMD can't keep the clock speed up with intel, they will still fall behind. A 700 mhz PIII would probably find a lot of applications (especially integer apps) where it would outperform a 600 mhz K7.
Quoted from John Carmack:
"AMD K7 cpus are very fast.
Some timedemo numbers (a new demo, not comparable to previous scores):
Run at 640*480*16 bit color to emphasise the cpu/driver performance rather than the hardware fill rate.
K7-600 K7-550 PIII-500
TNT2 ultra 16 bit 73.9 68.5 53.8
Voodoo3 3000 16 bit 70.5 65.2 46.0
This is with K7 optimized drivers vs seperate PIII optimized drivers.
There is still wiggle room there in that it is possible that more effort was expended to make the AMD drivers perform better. That is perfectly valid from a consumer's point of view, but muddies the technical CPU comparison. On identical code run on the systems, there was some more interesting data:
On my map processing tools, the K7 was faster than the PIII, but only slightly more so than the reletive clock rate increase. I would guess that this is due to larger data sets that don't fit in cache as well.
On the matrox OpenGL drivers, which have not been optimized very much and(to my knowledge) contain no PIII specific code, the K7 was a LOT faster. The bottom line is that I feel comfortable standing behind the statement that the K7 is faster than the PIII. I will have to wait for some stuff to come out of NDA to provide a more detailed technical analysis.
Architectural cleverness is all well and good, but if AMD can't keep the clock speed up with intel, they will still fall behind. A 700 mhz PIII would probably find a lot of applications (especially integer apps) where it would outperform a 600 mhz K7.
. K7 looks pretty good so far. And this way, I will have a SS7, Intel, and K7 system, to switch between and play with.
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