Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

David Mosberger
2003-02-23T23:49:04Z

>>>>> On Sun, 23 Feb 2003 15:06:56 -0800, "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com> said:

Linus> Last I saw P4 was kicking ia-64 butt on specint and friends.
>> I don't think so. According to Intel [1], the highest
>> clockfrequency for a 0.18um part is 2GHz (both for Xeon and P4,
>> for Xeon MP it's 1.5GHz). The highest reported SPECint for a
>> 2GHz Xeon seems to be 701 [2]. In comparison, a 1GHz McKinley
>> gets a SPECint of 810 [3].

Martin> Got anything more real-world than SPECint type
Martin> microbenchmarks?

SPECint a microbenchmark? You seem to be redefining the meaning of
the word (last time I checked, lmbench was a microbenchmark).

Ironically, Itanium 2 seems to do even better in the "real world" than
suggested by benchmarks, partly because of the large caches, memory
bandwidth and, I'm guessing, partly because of it's straight-forward
micro-architecture (e.g., a synchronization operation takes on the
order of 10 cycles, as compared to order of dozens and hundres of
cycles on the Pentium 4).

BTW: I hope I don't sound too negative on the Pentium 4/Xeon. It's
certainly an excellent performer for many things. I just want to
point out that Itanium 2 also is a good performer, probably more so
than many on this list seem to be willing to give it credit for.

--david