Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[jhalada]

Elmer,

I couldn't find that table at either of the links you provided

You have to actually download the software, install it, and one of the options brings up that table.

the reference is to an old Itanium running x86 mode. Not a Madison and not a McKinley.

I am not sure how much changed other than clock speed. Do you have any refernce about improved x86 performance?

While Madison has a huge cache, which at some point can gain an order of magnitude performance (due to no cache misses), Itanium's problem is in the hardware implementation of x86, and they are so severe that cache plays no material role.

If you compare other processors with small caches such as Duron, Celeron, Willamette, Athlon, they are all in 4 to 6 range (needing 4-6 CPU clocks for 1 Flop) Itanium needs 38.9, while it has fewer cache misses

To come up with some actual performance, the highest speed Madison has 1,500M cycles per second so it should be able to process 38 MFLOPs per second, the average of the other processors is approximately 2 GHz able to process a flop per evey 5 clocks resulst in 400 MFLOPs per second (which I can confirm with the actual result of my Seti run right now).

So current processor can process more than 10x of what Itanium can process is x86 mode.

Now Intel has a plan B, which is to come up with software emulation, but nothing has been released, and no performance increase (if any) is known.

Joe