Re: Athlon/FIC SD11

[mcamacho habitat co cr (Manuel Camacho)]

On Thu, 23 Dec 1999, Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> I am curious about a couple of things.  I, too, have a new ASUS K7M with
> an Athlon K7, but at 550.  I get a bogomips figure of 552.14 (cat
> /proc/cpuinfo).  On my AMD K6-3 450, it turns in a bogomips of 900+. I
> know it is BOGOmips, but I am curious about the wide disparity.

Hi Bob!

Well, could be right about the Bogomips. But, what is the big deal about
Athlon then??? According to what I have read, most newer AMD's processors up to
the Athlon were designed to use super7 interface,  which is an extension of
socket 7 design, allowing for increased board speeds up to 100 MHz. The
processor or front side bus speed of the Athlon is 200 MHz, which is twice the
motherboard speed. This is because the Slot A architecture is able to transmit
on both the rising and falling edge of the 100 MHz clock signal, doubling the
data rate to 200 MHz.

So, I would say that instead of getting an improve in the processor
performance, you get an increase of the system performance.

Why such a disparity in the bogomips? Don't know. But I really prefer thinking
of bogomips as a "Twilight's Zone"'s measure of performance =).

-Manuel.