[geeks] Itanium 32 bit performace.... hahahaha

[Phil Stracchino]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 10:31:14AM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> The PC world can't even claim speed anymore.  I used a Pentium 4 2.3GHz
> system yesterday.  I was -stunned- how slowly it ran Windows XP.  It
> wasn't the memory (512MB) or the video (GeForce 2) or the disk
> (ATA-133).  It's just that the architecture has finally reached the
> limits of its usefulness and that the P4 isn't nearly as ballsy as
> Intel's previous offerings.

And that XP is a bloated pregnant sow that, from what I'm told, doesn't
start to perform decently in under a gigabyte of RAM....  Every new
generation of Windows is slower and more bloated than the one before.


> Either XP is a lot, lot, lot more bloated than I gave it credit for, or
> there's only an incrementfl increase in speed between my Athlon (almost
> three years old) and a Pentium 4 system built this year.

Or both.  Performance is starting to hit the memory wall hard.  Remember,
every time the CPU gets a cache miss, it's got to throttle back to the
speed of the next level of cache, main memory, or (gods of chaos help
us) disk.  And on every machine I've seen it running on, XP *hammers*
the disk.

Also take into account that the P4 design is reportedly optimized for
certain types of operations (though no-one outside Intel seems to be
really clear on what they are), and as a general-purpose processor, it
sucks.  Clock for clock, a P4 is slower than a P3, and a P3 is slower
than an Athlon.


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