Ik kwam via Ace's Hardware bij deze site van Paul Hsieh, waar een behoorlijk heftig artikeltje staat waarin de architectuur van de AMD Athlon, Intel Pentium III en Compaq Alpha 21264 worden vergeleken. Laat ik er een stukje uit prikken:
There has been a lot of talk about the K7's floating point capability. Especially given the poor reputation of Intel's x86 competitors on floating point. The interest in the K7's floating point probably overshadowed any other feature.I think AMD knew they had to deliver on floating point or forever suffer the backlash of the raving lunatics that would be denied their Quake frame rate being pegged at the monitor's refresh rate. And there is no question that AMD has delivered. On top of being fully pipelined (the P6 is partially pipelined when performing multiplies) AMD had the gaul to make a superscalar FPU. I would have thought that this was impossible given the horribly constipated x87 instruction set, but I was shocked to find that its really possible to execute well above one floating point operations per clock (on things like multiply accumulates.) [break] Paul concludeert: [/break] Taken in total, the number of improved features of the K7 over previous generation processors leaves little doubt that in fact the K7 is truly a 7th generation processor. You don't have to take my word for it though. There are plent of reviews that show benchmark after benchmark with the K7 absolutely creaming the contemporary P6. So 7th generation it is.
Als je trek hebt in geleuter over FSTORE's, FXCH's, ALU's en meer van dat soort grappen, dan zou ik dit artikeltje ff gaan lezen.
