Als reaktie op de recente geruchten over plannen van Bill om de goedkope AMD K6-2 processor te gebruiken in de X-Box console heeft JC een artikeltje in elkaar gedraaid met een vergelijking tussen de K6-2, Hitachi SH-4 (Sega Droomkast) en Sony Emotion (PS2). Hier een stukje:
I'm noticing some people whispering that Microsoft is considering the ultracheap 180nm K6-2-500 for their X-Box, with the rationale that pumping that with a T&L engine will hide the slow floating point unit.But more interesting is this: All the other next generation console cpus (emotion, sh-4, possibly the PPC Gecko) rely primarily on special SIMD instructions not unlike the 3DNow! on the K6-x. They don't use what we in the PC industry consider a "regular fpu". Instead, game makers are "forced" to use the proprietary SIMD ops on these cpus. The interesting thing here is that if you make a game only for 3DNow! SIMD and not x87 (most "3DNow! enhanced" games in the PC marketplace only use a little SIMD but mostly still rely on x87 fpu, which is why you see little performance boost in most of these games), then you'll likely see a tremendous amount of performance pumping out of that faux-puny K6-2.
