does the x86 architecture hinder performance?

Soccerman

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Oct 9, 1999
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title says it all, I'm just wondering what people (who know what they're talking about) think!
 

dee

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Oct 9, 1999
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A couple of days ago the x86 p4 was the leading processor in specint2000 & specfp2000 (before the new alpha & itanium scores came out) so I'd have to say that x86 does'nt seem to be hindering things too much.
 

BurntKooshie

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Oct 9, 1999
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I disagree. I think it does hinder it, but it just has more resources thrown at it, and tends to be on a better process technology, and is always being pushed hard for time-to-market.

The P4 has many innovative technologies (some of which actually hinder performance on current code which is unoptimized for the architecture, and I'm talking about more than just SSE2 and FPU stuff). Imagine if RISC vendors used them all at the same time that Intel has been - the RISC boxes would probably smash x86. The PA-RISC 8700, to quote Paul DeMone, is "HP?s third and most recent attempt to hide a superscalar RISC CPU in an SRAM." It's a standard 4-issue RISC chip, with some cool features, but mostly, mammoth on-die caches. If other architectures included as many innovations as the P4 does, x86 would be in trouble. Thankfully, most other vendors have smaller development teams, use older process technologies, and are more likely to be hampered by politics.
 

ElFenix

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Mar 20, 2000
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x87 hinders performance more than anything else. integer pretty much is damn fast on x86. but the x87... theres a lot of problems with it that intel decided were not worthwhile to solve, so they bailed for IA-64. AMD says they can do workarounds. which of course won't be as high performing as IA-64 FPUs will be, but i'd like to see what they come up with anyway.
 

BurntKooshie

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Oct 9, 1999
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AMD canned Technical Floating Point in favor of SSE2 support, so if that's the workaround you're thinking of...it's not gonna happen in the Hammer series any time soon.
 

BurntKooshie

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Oct 9, 1999
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Yeah, I read that earlier today (both the post at the Inquirer, and that post by Mr. DeMone)....scarry thought....