FPUs: No Contest

Augu st 1997 / Inbox / FPUs: No Contest

Do you know if Cyrix's M2 will have a better (or at least similar) FPU than Intel's Pentium? Does the M2 or AMD's K6 have a pipelined FPU? Why do Cyrix and AMD pay less attention to the FPU than anything else? If Cyrix and AMD chips had similar integer performance and a better FPU, I think their CPUs would be superior to Intel's.
Faris Elkurd
faris@uakron.edu

Intel's x86 chips definitely have better floating-point (FP) performance than AMD's or Cyrix's chips. Intel's FPUs are pipelined, and AMD's and Cyrix's are not. Intel has done other optimizations as well. However, AMD and Cyrix design their chips for the mainstream PC user, and the majority of PC applications largely consist of integer operations and don't need much FP performance. Intel wants the mainstream user, but it also wants a piece of the Unix workstation market and uses its x86 processors in supercomputers, which are mainly designed for FP-intensive applications. If FP performance really does matter to you, then you're better off with a RISC-based system. To participate in more discussions about this and related matters, try our public "chipcon" conference. You can find a link on the BYTE home page, or go directly to http://dev4.byte.com/chipcon . --Eds.

Copyright

Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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