Re: Pentium 4

[William T Wilson <fluffy@snurgle.org>]

On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Alexander Isacson wrote:

> Will I have to recompile all major components in order to get decent
> speed with the p4?

Recompiling won't help; there's no P4-optimizing GCC.  The P4 is actually
respectable at the sort of bit shoveling that characterizes "average"
applications - the thing it really sucks at is floating-point.

> Whats the best thing to do? Buy an AMD-CPU instead?

It depends on how good of a deal you get on the P4.  The Athlon is, for
general purpose applications, faster than a P4, even at slower clock
speeds.  However, for anything that uses SSE, the P4 will be faster.  
Mostly, you will only use SSE for media-related activities - MPEG, MP3 and
other media encoding and decoding.  The P4 also has a higher memory
bandwidth for applications that are demanding on that - mostly media
again, but also Quake 3 (for other games it is basically a wash).  For
practically anything else the Athlon will be faster and require no special
treatment.