On Tue, 28 Sep 1999 14:19:11 +0200, Remco de Korte wrote:
>Philip Bartol wrote:
>> 
>> This is what I was told about my Evergreen 586 upgrade to my PC. A while ago I
>> rendered that simple glass that I made in sPatch... it took 7 hours to render
>> (setting max_trace_level high was part of the problem) but I was told then
>> that the AMD FPUs aren't that fast, however I never did hear back from that
>> person if they knew if it was all AMDs or just the older 586s....
>> 
>> This is something I need to look into. 
>
>I've just tried to find out about this. It's not easy to tell. AMD may be a bit
>slower on FPUs but is more efficient on memory management and other things so
>I've been told. The way I interpreted all information Intel is a few percent
>faster but it's also more expensive (about 15% over here - with 450Mhz).
>I opted for AMD but I don't think that was a 100% rational choice.

I have an AMD K6/233 at home.  When I bought it, it was the best bang for the
buck.  Yes, the FPU might be a little slower, but I'm betting it's not slow 
enough to make up for the extra 100 MHz or so I could afford by not buying 
Intel.

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Even if I wanted to use AMD I can't.  (not that I'd want to)

The reason being that 3D Studio MAX is specific to Intel processors.

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Just saw a stock market analyst commenting on AMD this morning.  He said
they were the worst managed business (in the US, World? something like that)
and they cannot keep the supply up with demand for their CPUs.  I'm just
telling about this, not opinion from myself.  I only go with Intel because
I'm a grazing animal <moo>.

Bob

Lance Birch <lan### [at] usanet> wrote in message
news:37f0cb37@news.povray.org...
> Even if I wanted to use AMD I can't.  (not that I'd want to)
>
> The reason being that 3D Studio MAX is specific to Intel processors.
>
>

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Margus Ramst wrote:

> Actually, POV depends pretty much on raw MHz. AMD's FPU might be a
> factor, but I
> don't think the classic Pentium has a much better unit. Perhaps
> something
> radical has been done in the BIOS, like turning off all processor
> caches. I
> cannot think of any peripheral that could slow down POV by a
> significant amount.
> How is the overall system performance? Does it swap a lot? Also, could
> you give
> a benchmark time for POV (e.g. skyvase.pov @ 640x480 AA 0.3)

The overall performance of the eMachine has been very good. It has only
been POV that shocked me. It does not need to use swap space much at all
since there is 160 MB of SDRAM and the POV scenes were fairly simple
although time consuming because of reflections.

Skyvase.pov rendered in 4 minutes and 57 seconds at a quality of 9,
640x480 AA 0.3. I will also try skyvase.pov on my old P120 laptop.

I will check the BIOS to see if I have inadvertently turned off the
processor cache or something else.

Thank you for the input Margus (and others too) !


(Later the next day) Well, I found the problem now that I studied the
system a little more carefully. It seems that both Netscape under Linux
and IE5 under Windows take lots of processor time even when they are
sitting idle. I usually have a browser open almost continuously since I
use a cable modem with an always live connection. Thanks again for all
the feedback on my question, the rendering time is now what it should be
for skyvase.pov on a K6-2 333 Mhz, about 2 minutes. I just have to make
sure I close any resource hogging browsers down when they are not in use
if I am rendering a time consuming scene!

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That's exactly correct actually.

That's why Gateway is dropping their AMD line soon.  AMD had problems with
the processors and couldn't supply Gateway with enough, causing a 5 week
backlog (which lost Gateway $200 million BTW...).

Also the other problem with AMD right now is that the Athalon processors are
relying on boards made in Taiwan, and of course the earthquakes caused
problems for the board manufacturers meaning that there is a shortage of
boards that support the new chip...

If they don't watch it they might just sink like Cyrix did.

Bob Hughes <inv### [at] aolcom> wrote in message
news:37f1276b@news.povray.org...
> Just saw a stock market analyst commenting on AMD this morning.  He said
> they were the worst managed business (in the US, World? something like
that)
> and they cannot keep the supply up with demand for their CPUs.  I'm just
> telling about this, not opinion from myself.  I only go with Intel because
> I'm a grazing animal <moo>.

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In article <37F190F1.15F6CFE8@cheerful.com>, Scott Sexton & David Lewis
<2b### [at] cheerfulcom> wrote:
>(Later the next day) Well, I found the problem now that I studied the
>system a little more carefully. It seems that both Netscape under Linux
>and IE5 under Windows take lots of processor time even when they are
>sitting idle. I usually have a browser open almost continuously since I
>use a cable modem with an always live connection. Thanks again for all
>the feedback on my question, the rendering time is now what it should be
>for skyvase.pov on a K6-2 333 Mhz, about 2 minutes. I just have to make
>sure I close any resource hogging browsers down when they are not in use
>if I am rendering a time consuming scene!

Sounds like maybe it's time to look into Opera... you gotta figure that MS is 
he king of BloatWare and Netscape isn't the smallest piece of software out 
their either. Back in the day (when I only had 4MB of RAM) I test installed a 
copy of IE4 (I was going to be installing it for someone on their office 
computer) and it rendered my Windows 3.11 useless from the splash screen on. I 
had to manually removed the components from DOS before I could get it up and 
running again.

BTW have you checked it when shutting off all sorts of Java?

PHIL

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