On 2000-07-04 22:46 -0400, Paul Murphy <pnmu...@home.com> wrote:

Perhaps because the Soundblaster may have been the first to use some (low level) programming interface, but may not be the best hardware. I always avoided Creative products, since they just didn't seem as good as other companies offerings (except for products developed by companies they bought and rebranded, like Ensoniq PCI sound-cards).

But with regard to using the AMD K6 in preference to Intel chips:

There was a time when Intel considered details about their processors a trade secret, and it was not possibly to write a free compiler for the Pentium, that knew how to make good use of the second pipeline.

There were very complex interdependencies. It often sped up a loop considerably, if a few NOPs were inserted at the right places, which is counterintutive, to say the least ;-)

That is the reason, that the AMD K5 performed so much better under FreeBSD than the Pentium it was rated against. The K5 had an execution engine much like that later introduced by Intel in the PentiumPro (i.e. what every current i586 and up compatible chip except for VIA/Cyrix/IDT does: pre-process the i86 instructions into RISC instructions for multiple independent execution units). For that reason, the K5 did not depend on such specific optimizations as the Pentium to keep its pipeline going.

With the (in)famous Appendix H being withheld from the GCC programmers, the Pentium only reached some 70% to 80% of its nominal performance ...

If reliability (i.e. 7x24, year after year) is your primary goal, then choose whatever seems to be well supported and proven. But for a home system or non-critical workstation, I'd use what provides the best value for the money. And that has often been an AMD processor in a motherboard that had been declared obsolete by Intel years ago ;-)

(In fact, I know a number of people running a K6-3 in their five year old Triton based mainboards. They easily beat my non-overclocked 300MHz Celeron A).

Regards, STefan

PS: Anybody seen any indications, that the K6-2+ or K6-3+ may become available as an upgrade processor ? Its low power consumption should make it ideal for old mainboards with an linear regulators.

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