What will Willaimette work well?

[MadRat]

Just what is Williamette going to do that P3 doesn't already do? There is alot of speculation out there, but most of it is negative. I want to hear the positive side of Williamette. Anybody know it?

 

[Sohcan]

In SSE2 enabled applications, Willy will perform well....otherwise, it 's FPU will be clock-for-clock weaker than the P3. This is because of Willy's 20-stage pipeline...it hard to appreciate how incredibly deep its pipeline is if you've never studied processor architecture. The MIPS CPUs that I've worked with have had a 5 to 7-stage pipeline (instruction fetch, instruction decode, register fetch, operand fetch, instruction execution, register store, operand store). By having such a deep pipeline, the Willy will often have pipeline holes, which occurs when a pipeline process must wait for another process to complete. This will in turn increase latency and possibly decrease the performance you can get per clock cycle.

Intel isn't too concerned about this, since they intend to have SSE2 replace the need for the FPU. There is one advantage to having such a deep pipeline: it allows Intel to ramp up the clock speeds, which is why Willy is debuting at 1.4GHz.

 

[Shagga]

Nice answer.

 

[MadRat]

What will this mean in typical applications?

Windows2000
Word/Excel/PowerPnt/Access 2000
raw integer calculations (RC5,2D-gaming,etc.)
Server Functions
etc.

 

[HaVoC]

<< What will this mean in typical applications?
Windows2000 >>

Should have excellent 32-bit performance and general Windows performance depends on a fast cache subsystem and integer performance, both of which should be very quick with Willy.


<< Word/Excel/PowerPnt/Access 2000 >>

The double pumped ALU should give some boost to these apps, especially Excel and Access with sorts and queries that are CPU intensive. Should beat AMD in this area.


<< raw integer calculations (RC5,2D-gaming,etc.) >>

RC5 because it is pretty much exclusively depedent on integer performance ALONE, will probably be an ideal application for Willy's double-pumped ALU.


<< Server Functions, etc. >>

Intel is designing the Willy variant Foster which is like a Xeon is to a PII/PIII. The fast ALU combined with a huge fast cache should make this a great server CPU, unless the requirement for RAMBUS prices them out of the market.

 

[extra]

HaVoC, won't Foster have DDR support and not rambus support?
(hope so, anyway)

 

[extra]

Oh yeah, and is it possible that Foster+DDR won't cost much more than Willamette+Rambu$ ?