[Tfug] AMD vs. Intel floating point

[Anthony Steckman]

Many of us at TCS run the Folding@home distributed computing software 
and it has been shown fairly consistently that an AMD will outperform an 
Intel of equal speed in terms of work unit output. People who seem to 
know about these things always say it's because of the way the AMD's 
handle floating point calculations.

I wouldn't stand by the assertion -- I hardly know what I'm asserting. I 
can say it's at least a very well established belief in the Folding@home 
community.


+ I'm probably responding to some of what was said below:

. Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 13:16:31 -0700
. Subject: [Tfug] AMD vs. Intel floating point
. From: John Gruenenfelder <johng@bach.as.arizona.edu>
. Reply-To: tfug@tfug.org
. To: Tucson Free UNIX Group <tfug@tfug.org>
. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
. 
. I am trying to put together an upgrade for a machine at work.  Our primary
. concern is number crunching power, especially floating point (lots of FFTs
. much of the time).  A number of place I have read show benchmarks with AMD
. chips ahead of Intel chips in FPU performance, but finding *good* benchmarks
. is very hard.
. 
. In particular, the machine is a choice between 2x Athlon MP 2600 (the 2700s
. not being available yet) or 2x Pentium 4 3Ghz.  There is, of course, a pretty
. big price difference too, but more important is FPU speed.
. 
. Does anybody have any good links to benchmarks either way?  Any experience in
. which is better?
. 
. 
. -- 
. --John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, Steward Observatory, U of Arizona
.                         johng@as.arizona.edu
. Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://gutenpalm.sf.net
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