Ga'ash Soffer van Voodoo Extreme heeft een artikel neer gemikt met speculaties over nieuwe CPU's die volgend jaar hun opwachting zullen maken. Hier een stukje:
-The Athlon is a hell of a product. It outperforms Intel counterparts significantly and costs around the same price. It's really a shame that OEMs aren't adopting the Athlon and that motherboard manufacturers are reluctant to make Slot A MBs.-The L1 cache looks like it has a great impact on Athlon's performance. 128K L1 is an insane amount. Since Spec and many other benchmarks depend a lot on cache, the 128K L1 cache may be one of the main (the main) reason the Athlon significantly outperforms Intel counterparts. Then again, fact is: Athlon is faster than P3.
-Coppermine shows more clearly the effects of cache.
-Merced estimated performance is around 50 SpecInt95, 75 SpecFP95. Not bad.
-EPIC sounds promising; however, compilers will be key.
-AMD Sledgehammer claims to close the gap on RISC processors in FPU performance. I have my doubts; RISC processors improve as well.
