George Woltman wrote:
(big snip)
> A question for readers. Prime95 currently uses about 8MB (exponent
> around 11 million). How would you feel if the P4 optimized version
> used 13MB? 23MB? 33MB?
>
> I hate to code up 3 versions of the P4 code (small, medium, large),
> but it might be necessary.
I'd say it would very much depend on what the typical mass-market P4 box
ends up coming with. Any modern, graphical web browser requires 5-6
megs of memory, more in typical operation. Five years ago, I would not
have dreamed that a single program would require that much, but now i
use them routinely. For that matter, my family's 286, which was out
primary machine into the 1990's, ran quite happily with a total of 640 k
of RAM.
If the typical P4 has 256 or 384 megs of memory, I don't think many
users running the now-typical programs would complain at Prime95 using
33 megs. OTOH, if the amount of memory is in the range now typical for
P3/Athlon systems, that might be a different story.
I should probably also note that most people using high-end systems now
are gamers or are using those systems as servers. In both cases, large
amounts of memory are necessary, and if people typically get systems
with memory in convenient powers of two, they may have some that they do
not use in day-to-day operation.
Nathan
P.S. My P3-600 with 128 megs of memory is set to make 70 megs available
to P-1 and the performance does not seem to greatly suffer.
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