Thomas Pabst (of Tom's Hardware Page, http://www.tomshardware.com) just
returned from Microprocessor Forum 98 with a wealth of AMD K7 info. In
general, it looks very promising. But relevant to GIMPS, here's what he says
about the FPU:
>The Floating Point Unit
>Haven�t we been taught by Intel how important the FPU is all those years?
>Well, it�s looking pretty obvious that K7 will smoke Intel�s P6 FPU. K7
>offers no less than 3 (three!) out-of-order, fully parallel FPU pipelines.
The
>good old disadvantage of the non-Intel CPUs in terms of FPU-performance
>will be history with K7. The upcoming seventh generation AMD processor
>will run CAD or rendering software faster than the Intel CPUs. That is
>almost a revolution.
I wonder how George's Intel-optimized FPU code will work on this new
architecture.
Greg Hewgill
