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Date:      Thu, 10 Jun 1999 19:30:28 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us>
To:        "Stein B. Sylvarnes" <sylvarnes@geocities.com>
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: P5 vs Celeron vs PII
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.9906101853590.91464-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.19990611012822.0079d930@mail.geocities.com>

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Moved to -chat... This is now way off-topic.

On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Stein B. Sylvarnes wrote:

> At 18:17 10.06.99 -0500, Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> wrote:
> >On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Dennis wrote:
> >
> >> 
> >> In  a nutshell, does anyone have a handle on the relative preformance of
> >> these are? 
> >> 
> >> 233Mhz P5 vs 233Mhz Celeron
> >Last time I looked, the price difference was enough that the Celeron
> >gives you more bang for the buck.
> >

> The AMD K6-3 has given best preformance/price, at least here in
> Norway. The lead has been signifficant, but most vendors have
> built their PCs with (W)Intel CPUs. For the home-builder/upgrader,
> the choice has been simple, though.

Tom Pabst of Tom's Hardware Guide (http://www.tomshardware.com) seems
to do some pretty good benchmarks, generally using real-world
applications (i.e. for benchmarking gaming performace, he actually
uses several different popular games, not some meaningless "3D
WinBench" scoring).

From what I have seen of the benchmarks on Tom's site, the K6-2/3 is
not all that great, in any situation.  In my real-world experience, it
seems to do just fine for everyday use on our Win95 boxen, but so do
the PII and Celeron systems.  I don't get much time to play a lot of
games on our systems though.  :-)

In another RealWorld(TM) experience of mine, a K6-2 300 system I have
(well, not at the moment) next to me does far fewer keys/sec for the
RC5DES challenge than our PII-300 systems.  According to the
Distributed.Net web site, the RC5DES algorithms don't even use
floating-point calculations, so the lower AMD FPU performance wouldn't
even be a factor here.  If anything I would have thought the AMD
processors would have done better because they do integer calculations
so well, but I guess not in this case.

> But lately Intel has dropped their prices, and if I was to buy a new CPU
> now, I would have to choose between PIII and K6-3 (They're pretty much
> equally fast, AMD a bit faster in Q2 in windoze)

Hmm... According to Tom's benchmarks, the AMD K6-3 450 did worse
(almost 4 FPS) than a Celeron 400 in Quake 2 with a Riva TNT2 based
card (TNT2 drivers are NOT 3DNow! optimized).  In Quake2 using a
VooDoo3 3500 card (whose drivers ARE 3DNow! optimized), the K6-3 450
fared much, much better than it did with the TNT2, but then only a
couple of FPS higher than a Celeron 400.  Now, if a Celeron or PII 400
which doesn't have anything but plain MMX can almost match a K6-3 450
with 3DNow! optimized software, imagine what a PIII could do with
SSE-optimized software.  Since the Celeron 400 is exactly half the
cost of a K6-3 450 (according to Pricewatch, I just checked), I
couldn't understand anyone buying an AMD processor for gaming or
other multimedia stuff, and especially not FPU-intensive stuff.

All this might change when the AMD K7 comes out, though.  :-) Let's
just hope the K7 lives up to what everybody has been hoping it will
be.


-- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net
   FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet.
   For Intel x86 and Alpha architectures (SPARC under development).
   ( http://www.freebsd.org )

   "One should admire Windows users.  It takes a great deal of
    courage to trust Windows with your data."



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