Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 04:34:09 -0000 From: Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com> To: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> Cc: cvs-src@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/i386 pmap.c Message-ID: <20031111041443.31955.qmail@exxodus.fedaykin.here> In-Reply-To: <20031026064145.18F0E2A8D5@canning.wemm.org> References: <20031026064145.18F0E2A8D5@canning.wemm.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sun, 2003-10-26 at 06:41, Peter Wemm wrote: > Jeff Roberson wrote: > > On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, Peter Wemm wrote: > > > Wow, pentium4 sucks. Yes, I agree then, we should revert the change. > I'll do it. > > > > Intel looks more disappointing every day. > > Well, think of their optimization goals... The pentium4 was designed for > two things.. 1) to increase MHz, since thats all dumbass customers and > sales droids understand, and 2) to increase game framerate benchmarks. > Anything that didn't contribute to that goal and consumed transistors > started losing. The trick is to find some way to make intel interested in your problems (e.g. change a large site from using intel processors to amd). When the marketing people start to care about an application, the technical people start to collect instruction traces to use for optimising the next generation. In the mid 90s, 486 processors had terrible floating point performance and intel didn't much care. Their instruction traces showed that the applications they cared about (mainly word and excel) didn't use floating point much. As soon as people started trying to use floating point more intensively for games software, intel started profiling and optimising for it and these days, their floating point performance is reasonable for all applications (not just games). The trick, I guess, is to make the right kind of case. If, for instance, the engineers developing Longhorn started telling Intel that AMD processors could e.g. context switch ten times faster than P4s and this would affect the performance of some bogus Longhorn feature, then I imagine things might change.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20031111041443.31955.qmail>