11 Nov
2006
11 Nov
'06
11:32 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
There were similar anomalies throughout much of the
Intel x86 line.
Early Socket 4 Pentiums could be outrun by a 486DX2 in some
circumstances and early P4s could be outrun by a P3. Or a Pentium
Pro could be substantially slower than a Socket 7 Pentium when
executing 16-bit code, and so on.
The former examples are all mostly vendor implementation-specific (size
of cache, wait state of dram, first Pentium motherboard logic
unoptimized, etc.), but the Pentium Pro example was by design: Intel
deliberately sped up 32-bit protected mode at the expense of 16-bit in
the design. It was quite intentional (something they ended up taking a
small amount of flak for).
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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