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Hardware

Tom's Hardware benchmarks K6-3 and PIII 70

Posted by CmdrTaco from the blow-your-hair-back dept.
Christopher Thomas writes "Tom's Hardware Page has finally posted comprehensive benchmark results for the Intel's Pentium III and AMD's K6-3." The quick summary is that Intel must be experiencing deep fear right now- the most significant change from the P2 is the cost. Fortunately the rumors of the 1ghz P3s are flying fast and furious. If you can't beat 'em, up the clockspeed.
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Tom's Hardware benchmarks K6-3 and PIII More

Tom's Hardware benchmarks K6-3 and PIII

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  • If you can't beat 'em, up the clockspeed.

    And then you can say "we've upped our clockspeed, so up yours."

    -- acb [sorry, couldn't resist...]
  • Why are people comparing the G3 and G4 and P3 to the Merced and Elbrus chips? There's no comparison to be made. When/if they arrive, they will be in an enterprise/supercomputing league, not the desktop league. This means, they will kill the desktop style processors.
  • Merced got preempted by years. If you want a high performance, relatively low cost RISC desk box or tower box, get a computer that uses the G3. Or wait around for the G4 to get released. The only thing that makes the Merced superior in any way to the G3 or maybe the G4 is that the Merced has 64 bit addressing, which PowerPC chips currently only have 32 bit addressing.
  • This is a completely valid point. But for those who need a more cost-effective solution, a K6-3 might better suite their needs. Besides, if you need power, why are you using an x86 chip anyway?
  • Tom says (in the conclusion):

    "AMD will definitely have a serious problem to place K6-3. Its Winstone performance would make it eligible to be promoted as a high-end processor, but this won't really work out as long as it performs worse than Celeron in most 3D-games."

    and

    "... get a Celeron if you care about 3D-games or other floating point intensive software."

    Michael
  • don't buy Intel chips
  • Of course they compare your computer to a VAX... but hey, they're freely available (in a public-domain sort of way... I don't see any license)
  • Like kernel compile times or something. I'm not particularly interested in "Winbench" scores. I also wish they had thrown in some K6-2 scores so I could see how much better the K6-3 is over what I have now.

    Even if the K6-3 isn't as fast as a celeron for 3D, if AMD gets the price down quick enough, it still might be a good buy. I beleive the PIII is going to be too expensive for most.
  • the Celeron doesn't support SSE, yet it still did better than the K6-3 (at same clock rates) on most tests...so it's not a result of benchmark bias toward SSE.

    And from a realistic standpoint, you have to work with the software available. So it doesn't matter if you have these great 3DNow! instructions if your software doesn't make use of them.
  • Almost all the tests done were with apps that supported SSE, but not 3DNow!. Of course the K6-3 will look bad when the playing field isn't level.
  • Also, did you think that maybe they took a sample of the available software out there? There just isn't as much written for 3dNow!
  • looks like they /. ed already. it's only been posted for 5 minutes and I can't get there.

    DAMN! It's 4:09 am in San Diego. I got to go to bed.

    -dave
  • Ignoring KNI, the PIII is equal to or just marginally better than the PII.

    The K6-3 is improvemed over the K6-2 in most benchmarks. If it was cheaper, I might get one.

    All in all, I'm pretty disappointed with both of these new chips. I think I'll wait for the next round before I upgrade.

    Any conspiracy theories regarding the late 3DNOW support and the early KNI adoption, or is that all above board?


    --
  • Anand [anandtech.com] has a nice little comparison of SSE and 3DNow! Biggest surprise to me (stupid me) was that you can execute 2 3DNow! instructions per cycle, but only one SSE--so the smaller registers don't make that much of a difference.
  • Why not have someone who has Linux benchamark them. Linux seems to not care very much about which x86 cpu you have because it doesn't have optimizations for most of their speical features anyway. This would tell us the best chip for Linux. I have used OS/2, Linux, Windows 9x, Windows NT, and many others and it seems the operating system does impact the performance that you can expect. Just becuase something is the best cpu for windows does not mean that it is the best Linux CPU.
  • "The only thing that will stop AMD from stealing the show is
    either high prices or buggy chips."

    Or, the same things that always stop AMD from stealing the show. . .

    late delivery and tight supply.

  • hello? (Score:1)

    by xyster ( 128 )
    why would you 'buy' linux?! its free
  • AMD's goose is cooked. The K6-3 is costly to produce and slower than the Celeron that Intel charges very little for, forcing AMD to charge less than they would like. Intel is bludgeoning them to death... They're going to twist people's arms to optimize for the PIII instructions, something AMD was unable to do for 3dNow, and Intel retains its FPU and graphics advantadges. Super high end users with too mucchmoney will buy the PIII and the budget buyers will buy Celerons. AMD better do something to shake em up,.
  • The benchmarks suggest that the PIII and K6-III perform equally on business applications, but that the PIII is better for games and other programs that use a lot of floating point operations.
  • Look, WC is a company of computer geeks for computer geeks. In a company run by, say, bankers, if your computers fail and someone finds out that you were running them at 150% of their specified clock speed and at the same time invalidating the warranty, some banker is going to find out about it and fire your ass.

  • Hmm, the 300a (66x4.5) is typically overclocked to 450 MHz (100x4.5). the 100 MHz bus seems to be friendlier to some things than the 83 MHz one (if you have PC100 RAM), so why not do the same thing with the Celeron 400 (66x6), and up it to 600 MHz (100x6)?
  • We don't have to speculate about which motherboards Tom used. See http://www.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990223/c pu-news-03.html

    The K6-III was tested on an Asus P5A, and the PIII was tested on an Asus P2B. Tom didn't mention the cache sizes, so I checked the Asus web site. The P5A has 512 KB, and the P2B has none.
  • At a tech luncheon at uni recently an engineer for AMD (who had worked on the k7 - I got to hold a waffer!) said that KNI and 3DNow were so similar that it was possible to change KNI (oops, i mean SSE) assembly code into 3dnow assembly code with a perl script.

    Unfortunately I don't know if AMD has told any of the software developers that this is the case, or even better provided them with a script to do it. It was hoped that adoption of SSE pushed by Intel's muscle would bring greater adoption of 3dnow. Still, if AMD doesn't get the word out, it won't happen.
  • Is there any real reason (except for inferior coolness) against it?

    I have production machines on P133 and PII/233. No problems yet.

  • That's actually very important: the pII/pIII are PentiumPro (weasel) cores. If we all think back to when PPro appeared, it was a bit scandalous -- it was slower at 16bit code than its predecessor, the Pentium.

    Having used Intel's vtune, I can tell you that win95/98 has a _lot_ of 16 bit code still in there, and I can believe that win95 runs faster on the K6. Yet, for all its pathetic dogged slowness, NT is truly 32 bit (even if it's 32 bit crap :) and in fact manages to run _faster than 95_ on the pII/pIII (ppro core) systems.

    If NT is faster than 95, Linux the HolyOS will really fly (which it does).

    However, my Celery300a is in the mail. You can still find 'em if you look carefully. Ohbaby.
  • The Deep fear that Intel will be feeling is related to the cost/benefit analysis of the P3. For corporations who want the most bang for their buck (leaving the Celeron out of the debate for now), AMD makes a comparable chip at a far more affordable price. If the P3 costs 3 times as much and only runs 10% faster, which would you choose?
  • Oops, forgot to log in. Did you bother to read the text of the article at all? The point was not that 3D Now! was bad, the point was what kinds of benefits you could expect from programs with KNI optimization over a standard 686 compiled version. I'm sure a 3D Now! optimized version would be somewhere up near the top of all of those benchmarks. The reason such "non-real world" benchmark tools were used was because there are NO good standard benchmarks for either of the new instruction sets. I'll admit Tom ran a pretty one sided review with lots of programs that had KNI optimizations and few with 3D Now!, but I don't think he tried to misrepresent that at all. Wait a minute, where are the 3D Now! optimized programs to do benchmarking? I guess AMD forgot to tell people to make them. Maybe that's why I would want to buy an AMD chip, crappy floating point and no developer support. Or is it the moderately better Win98 performance? Could someone please tell me the obvious advantage other then price that I am missing here?
  • Each time AMD releases something new I get worked up, hoping that finally they've got something that can compete with Intel. Each time however they always are shown to be six months behind at least. A few friends who are close to the K7 development have said it's a killer processor, but considering what Intel will have coming out at the same time, I have serious doubts about it being AMD's savior.

    It seems they can't learn from their own mistakes. The biggest knock against AMD for a long time has been terrible floating point performance, yet they've never done anything about it. I wish they would just shake things up and break away from their apparent mindset of, "Intel is doing this in 6 months, we have to do it in 12 then," and do something completely different. If AMD ever wants to truly be taken seriously and end the constant talk of how this is the end, I don't see what else they can do.
  • Should we really be getting excited about a 1 GHz P3? The article I read said it was probably being cooled by liquid nitrogen, which _probably_ means it won't be shipping anytime soon. In fact, I think the article said AMD was likely to have a 1 GHz chip before Intel, plus the hype (which may be unreliable, granted) is that the K7 will be faster than the P3 at similar clock speeds. Intel watch out!
  • Hmm, I guess it's time to look into that liquid cooling :P

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