Hmmm,
I took 1 graduate level course in Chip design in college ( this makes me an expert right? ;-).
Back then the K6 had 3 "floating point pipes?" where the pentium only had 1 ( this was several beers ago so bare with me).
So on each cycle the K6 could potentially do 3 times the work.
Problem was none of the code of the time was written to take advantage of the additional (pipes)? (Please correct me if I am using the wrong terminology.)
The below statement makes me wonder if Intel really has a better platform for Floating point operations than AMD or if the code has still not been totally optimized to utilize functionality in AMD Opterons?
I had always heard that AMD was better for FP performance ( I prefer AMD so I am biased ).
AMD seems to continually lag behind Intel on memory bandwidth and bus speeds.
Was wondering if anyone was willing to open floor to a discussion on which tests the industry measures Floating point performance and which of these tests would most closely relate to running Prime95. Or perhaps in this case the memory benchmarks are equally important.
AMD posts performance of Opterons here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_8796_8800,00.html
Performance sites have a daunting list of tests but this one seems to measure floating point:
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2004q2/#SPECfp
Of course this could open a whole can of wurms as to whether these tests are really "optimized" for the processor / platform?
Also was curious if there was any optimizing done in the code (Prime95) to take advantage of an Athlon 64 or an Opteron feature and if not would it be possible to "port" the code to utilize any underutilized abilities?
I currently have an Athlon 64 3200 with 1 GB of PC3200 ram.
I am currently getting .118 iteration time on a 33900000 number.
I see on our benchmark page that some of the P4s were getting 0.053 in the same range.
The industry benchmarks dont show Intel x2 performance of AMD so wondering what is at play here.
I imagine the old Van Newman bottleneck is hurting AMD here and that it is really an issue more with memory bandwidth.
Would be interesting to see what results would be if the same memory bandwidth was held the same ( throttle back Intel ) to see what the effect has on iteration times.
To bad we couldnt do the iterations entirely from the CPU registers. ;-)
This was not intended to be a novel nor the start of the processor wars but he goes.
Instructions: 1. Pull Pin 2. Throw
From: "John R Pierce" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Prime] It's official
Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 12:52:15 -0700
I'm impressed by the speed of verification; it sounds as if the FFT itself
ran in parallel on the Itaniums, which I thought people on this list had
repeatedly claimed was impractical. Is it in fact practical but pointless --
you could check a single number in eight days on a dual Opteron, but just
running Prime95 on both CPUs would check two numbers in fourteen.
The Intel Itanium has monster FPU performance and memory bandwidth, both of which greatly help the LL tests.
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