[rescue] R8k I2's

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 12:52:03AM -0500, Andrew Weiss wrote:

> On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 10:21  PM, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> >
> >OK, the R8k was a stop gap measure until the R10k was ready.   SGI
> >needed a machine with really good floating point performance.  So, they
> >introduced the R8k, which used some really cutting edge design ideas to
> >get this performance.  One of the problems is that they traded integer
> >performance for floating point.  So many applications that aren't
> >floating point heavy ran slower on this than on previous chips.  Also,
> >the R8k had a deep pipeline and having to flush it was very expensive.

> MMM SGI's P4...

Err, wouldn't be the opposite of a P4?  Instead of sacrificing FP for
int like the P4, it sacrificed int for float?

I'm not a big fan of x86, but I particularly find the P4 horrifying.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd