SSE: Not So Clearcut

Thresh
Objection, your honor (pssha), on the grounds of blatant speculation. If you wanna go there, from current reports over the 'Net, it looks like AMD's K7 is going to stomp all over your precious Katmai and make it cry home to mama. This monster is gonna have between 512k and 8MB of L2 cache, and what's more it's going to be running on a 200Mhz motherboard. Early tests at 500Mhz shows the K7 surpassing Katmai performance already, in both integer and floating point. If there's ever a processor ready to take on Quake III, then I'm betting this will be the one.

In addition, from the preliminary tests of Katmai, it appears that there will be very little (if at all) performance difference between this new rehash with the current Pentium II, especially for today's games. On standard everyday applications, the only difference between a P2-450 and a Katmai 500 is the clock rate. Overclock the P2 to 500, and there's no noticeable difference at all. We've all heard the hype around KNI, and while it certainly sounds great, I remember being excited about the first SIMD implementation from Intel several years back - remember MMX?

Remember when you brought in G-Nome, and how quickly we realized how much of an utter joke that was? MMX didn't do jack then, and it doesn't do jack now.Unfortunately, it doesn't look like MMX has gotten any better since then, and until I see the performance numbers for KNI, I'm not gonna even hold my breath on it. As of now, AMD is the only mainstream processor manufacturer to deliver a proven version of SIMD (let's just leave out Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc VIS for this discussion). I was duly impressed with K6-2's performance at the PGL Quake II finals.