Well, you did a lot of quoting, and it sure sounded good. But I always recommend
looking at independent reviews and benchmarks. One such can be found from
http://www.anandtech.com

AMD's Athlon is currently at 700 MHz and in some respects it is still the best.
It has the fastest FPU, which is what we POVers want. It is a completely new
architecture, while the Intel processors still use the same basic architecture
that Pentium Pro used back in '95.
For me, the Athlon currently seems like the best choice. Athlon motherboards are
as yet kind of expensive and sometimes below average quality; but the i820
chipset designed for the new Intel mobos have been delayed altogether.

Gawd, I'm rambling OT again... Bad! Bad!

Margus

TonyB wrote:
> 
> Hello, everybody! Guess what? Intel just announced that thanks to advances
> in their manufacturing methods, they now have processor speeds of up to
> 733MHz. These new processors are the successors of the Pentium III and will
> be differenced from their predecessors by a plus sign (+) after the MHz.
> They are manufactured using 0.18-micron technology and sport a sixth layer.
> Also new is ATC (Advanced Transfer Cache) and ASB (Advanced System
> Buffering), both of which increase speeds greatly. To quote Intel: "A
> heavily integrated and highly optimized 256 KB, 256-bit-wide, on-die Level 2
> ATC provides outstanding bandwidth - up to 11.7GB at 733 MHz, for example -
> while delivering an impressive 4X reduction in Level 2 latency. The cache is
> organized as an 8-way set associative configuration that, combined with the
> high bandwidth and lower latency, delivers this increase in cache
> performance for real applications. In addition, the performance of the
> Advanced Transfer Cache scales with core frequency." Another new thing is
> the 133 MHz system bus. Using a benchmark, they compared 2 600MHz Pentium
> III's: the new one and the old one. The new one provided a 20% performance
> increase over its predecessor.
> 
> I'm impressed and hope that Intel will continue to improve on its product
> and advance computers and computer graphics so that the little guy can
> render some real nice stuff. =)
> 
> To read the rest, go to
> http://developer.intel.com/update/contents/it11994.htm.
> 
> PS: Yes... this does go out to you POV programmers. You either find a way to
> exploit this new speed and give us an excuse to buy these processors, or
> else... ;)

Post a reply to this message