Reply 80 of 107, by feipoa
- Rank
- l33t++
I've finished AMD's up to the K6-166 Mhz by now and will work on the 200 sometime today. Unfortunately, I am waiting for a K5-133 MHz to be sent to me for testing from a fellow Canadian. My 117 Mhz K5 wouldn't run at 133 MHz, and I don't know any which will. I got my K5 to run almost all the tests at 125 MHz (1.5x83), with the exception of 2 benchmarks, 3dmark99max and Final Reality. Those will have to wait for the K5-133 Mhz as well. I don't have any of the new values on the spreadsheet yet, but I suspect the overall performance of a K5-125 Mhz will match that of the K5-133 MHz due to the 83 Mhz vs. 66 Mhz enhancement.
Now to respond to your comments. Comparing the Cyrix 6x86-120 with the AMD K5-120, I see that for ByteMark's 32-bit DOS FPU calc, they both got 75% of a P90, but in Quake 1 (640x480), the Cyrix scored only 8.2 fps whereas the AMD was awarded 10.1 fps. Looking at WinBench99 - FPUWinmark, the Cyrix scored 247 and AMD scored 388.
For integer operations for ByteMark, the Cyrix got 160% of a P90 and the AMD got 183%. Looking at interger ops using CPUMark99, the Cyrix got 9.74 and the AMD K5 got 9.43. Both chips were run at 2x60.
From the results noted above, the Cyrix 6x86 and K5 seemd fairly equal integer-wise, but the Cyrix fell very behind the K5 for FPU operations. The main weakness of the K5 was in the area of division, ALU and FPU. For division, Cyrix was twice as fast.
Some examples from PassMark at 120 MHz
Cyrix ALU Division: 5.2
AMD ALU Division: 2.5
Cyrix FPU Division: 2.9
AMD FPU Division: 1.5
The Cyrix fell way far behind in all other math tests. For example, Cyrix integer addition: 18.9, AMD K5 was at 28.2.
For the K6 at 133 Mhz, ALU divide 4.1, FPU divide 3.1. That is certainly more than just 13 MHz of improvement. I've been pretty impressed by the K6 numbers so far, however I generally do not like to start making conclusions until I've finished the project.
The major benefit of running these tests with one computer and one person is that all the results are directly comparable. Uncertainties with different motherboard performance, operator errors, etc. have been eliminated.
I have not gotten to the non-MMX Pentium's yet. I only started the AMD K6 tests at 133 Mhz, so we'll have to wait for the 133 Mhz data from the K5's for a 133 Mhz show down. I tried to source my own K5-PR200 for some time but was unsuccessful.
My biggest mistake with this work has been by way of using a Matrox Millennium G200. This particular graphics card didn't have optimised OpenGL drivers for driver version 4.33 and I could only use up to version 4.33 for the non-MMX Cyrix 6x86 chips. For whatever reason, version 5 and 6 of the driver just wouldn't boot into Windows using a non-MMX Cyrix 6x86. Driver version 6.28, however, worked fine on the MMX Cyrix's. What this means is that for 486's and the non-MMX Cyrix chips, the 3DMark99 and Quake2-OPenGL scores are not following the trend. Luckily, I was not going to include the OpenGL-based Quake2 scores, only the software ones for the final charts. I will need to account for the 3DMark99 scores somehow though. Luckily, Direct3D stuff worked fine with Matrox driver 4.33.
It would have been more interesting for me if Cyrix would have created a 200 MHz (4x50) 5x86 for the socket 3. People were still buying 486 boards new in 1997 - I did and so did my friend. I wonder how this would have altered the Cyrix/AMD landscape? Perhaps in an alternate universe, this is what happend?
EDIT: Nice Pentium killer article you found! I've saved it into a PDF.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.