At One Glance
Overview of the benchmarks and the percent performance increase of performance of the Palomino over the Thunderbird in SSE-optimized and non-SSE optimized applications. The highest gains are seen in Caligari trueSpace 4.2 and the Adobe benchmarks with trueSpace 4.2 experiencing almost a doubling in performance. Gaming applications are affected to a much lesser degree reflecting other system limitations and/or less efficient compliation of the software for SSE optimization.
Conclusion
With the original release of the Athlon, only 19 of the total of 71 SSE instructions were included into the K7 core. Possible reasons are licensing of proprietary instructions, time to market (everything needs to be debugged and verified) or simply negligence (who did care about SSE when it first came out). Suffice it to say that non-technical issues were the reasons for not including the full set of SSE instructions into the original Athlon core.
Having gotten this out of the way, here is what incorporating SSE (SIMD) really means. One of the few market segments that are not just oriented but devoted to performance is the high-end CAD market. Moreover, this market is dominated by a few software outfitters such as Caligari with their truSpace and iSpace programs that are, quite honestly speaking, some of the finest pieces of software around. A similar role can be attributed to Adobe. Photoshop, Illustrator and PhotoDeluxe are the most dominant and, let's not forget, most powerful graphics editing programs in the current market.
The question that comes to mind is what came first: the hen or the egg? Did these programs become as powerful as they are now because they catered to Intel or simply because they read the signs of the times and optimized their software according to the latest accomplishments in CPU technology? This is a question that belongs into the National Enquirer rather than into a hardware review, because, it really doesn't matter. What matters is the result and the result is overwhelming.
When was the last time that we heard about doubling the performance by means of a few optimizations without changing clockspeed? The emphasis is on doubling. This is what Intel has done 2 years ago and what has been successfully repeated by AMD just now. As mentioned earlier, the reasons for the delay were of non-technical nature.
Where Does and where Doesn't it matter?
There are enough applications where performance really doesn't matter, office applications, regardless of how demanding they are, fall into this category. There are, however, other applications where computing time is one of the critical limiting factors for productivity and high end graphics as well as CAD applications fall into this sector. This is where the Athlon 4 really shines with outstanding performance. In other words, in the case of the Athlon 4, AMD has not delivered empty clock speed but refined the Athlon 4 to deliver performance in one of the few areas where the PC is still underpowered.
To rephrase this, for office applications in any form, there is hardly any need to increase performance over last year's standards. However, it was only about 2 years ago that the most highly anticipated game in the world Trespasser had to be taken off the market because there was no hardware around that could handle this game. Trespasser was just one application geared towards the entertainment market but there are others, particularly CAD and high end graphics applications that, in the near future, will be instrumental in defining virtual tours and other forms of content creations. It is those applications that drive the professional market and still need a lot more computing power than a conventional desktop can deliver. It is those applications also where the Athlon 4 can provide an excellent solution.
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