Re:Intel discontinues Joule, Galileo, and Edison product lines
by Klinky on Monday June 19, 2017 @08:05PM
(#14591318)
You are correct, the K6 did not beat Intel. It was the Athlon/Athlon64 that had better IPC than the Pentium 4.
Re:Intel discontinues Joule, Galileo, and Edison product lines
by Already__Taken on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @03:25AM
(#14592753)
When my athlon died it seemed quick and easy to get a shockingly fast celeron, i think they were nearly 3ghz? I couldn't believe how poorly that PC ran compared to the althon chugging at a lowly 2ghz. Got another athlon after a few months and firmly put to bed the ghz war for me.
Re:Intel discontinues Joule, Galileo, and Edison product lines
by josefx on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @08:26AM
(#14594008)
> my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played.
How old is the Intel compiler again? Both the Pentium 2 and K6 had the MMX extension. Code compiled with the rather popular Intel compiler checked the CPU vendor ID to force programs into badly optimized code paths with disabled extensions on competitors products. It was a nice undocumented feature until 2005 and makes any experienced performance difference suspect.
I cannot speak for the K6 vs original Pentium but the K6-2 was what I had as a kid and even though it was cheap and cheerful it seemed handily bested by the P2. Synthetic benchmarks which took advantage of 3DNow were roughly even but games were pretty poor - with otherwise equivalent hardware (128MB ram, Voodoo3) my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played. The K6-3 maybe edged the P3 according to the magazines I devoured at the time, but I don't think it was pretty popular and it seemed like a stopgap until the Athlon came out. Athlon genuinely bested the P3 and P4 on price, power and performance for a good while. I still have fond memories of picking up a sub-GHz AXIA core Athlon for under 100 GBP and taking it to 1GHz and slightly beyond. That was pretty fun :-)