Lol.
Well, I whipped up a fabulous Socket 7 system last night to play with a AMD 5k86 PR100. Never really messed with one so I was curious as to how AMD's first home-designed CPU worked.
Would you believe its integer performance, at 100Mhz, scores around a P233MMX in Sandra 2004? I was slightly impressed to say the least. The FPU is really awful though, scoring below a P66.
What's more interesting about this is that my chip is a SSA/5 5k85, which is the first spin of the K5. The later PR120+ models were radically improved and ran at a lower clock than their PR rating (original chips clocks were = to PR rating).
From a little reading on the architecture I've learned that it's more of a 6th gen chip for integer work. It has a lot of Pentium Pro like functionality. However, the first run of the chip took so long to get working that they had to push it out in a "preview" sort of state. That's why the later chips were so much faster and ran lower clock than the PR rating. The K5 has massive integer power, but really neglected floating point capabilities.
Apparently the K5 was one of the fastest x86 CPUs per clock ever. It just couldn't scale up enough in clock speed and was far too late to market. And the FPU is horrible. Though if it had been released when it should've, FPU performance would not have mattered much at all because that would've been pre-Quake. Though Quake is really more of an example of what happens when you optimize a bit too much for one manufacturer's CPU (P54), it was really the first consumer app to use a lot of FP and have a huge audience.
Well, I whipped up a fabulous Socket 7 system last night to play with a AMD 5k86 PR100. Never really messed with one so I was curious as to how AMD's first home-designed CPU worked.
Would you believe its integer performance, at 100Mhz, scores around a P233MMX in Sandra 2004? I was slightly impressed to say the least. The FPU is really awful though, scoring below a P66.
What's more interesting about this is that my chip is a SSA/5 5k85, which is the first spin of the K5. The later PR120+ models were radically improved and ran at a lower clock than their PR rating (original chips clocks were = to PR rating).
From a little reading on the architecture I've learned that it's more of a 6th gen chip for integer work. It has a lot of Pentium Pro like functionality. However, the first run of the chip took so long to get working that they had to push it out in a "preview" sort of state. That's why the later chips were so much faster and ran lower clock than the PR rating. The K5 has massive integer power, but really neglected floating point capabilities.
Apparently the K5 was one of the fastest x86 CPUs per clock ever. It just couldn't scale up enough in clock speed and was far too late to market. And the FPU is horrible. Though if it had been released when it should've, FPU performance would not have mattered much at all because that would've been pre-Quake. Though Quake is really more of an example of what happens when you optimize a bit too much for one manufacturer's CPU (P54), it was really the first consumer app to use a lot of FP and have a huge audience.
