Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on February 4, 2013 2:27 am wrote:
> Patrick Chase (patrickjchase.delete@this.gmail.com) on February 3, 2013 2:27 pm wrote:
> >
> > With that said, you gave me plenty of evidence yourself. R10K was >50% bigger for a 10% advantage
> > in integer and a 50% advantage in FP.
>
> 50% in FP is for Spec95, I assume.
> In Spec2k the difference was ALOT bigger - 2.4x.
> I wonder why Spec2k and spec95 produce so different pictures?

Two words: Cache footprint.

SpecFP95 had a notoriously small working set. SpecFP2k was better in that respect. The R14K you cite had an 8 MB external last level cache, vs. 512 KB for the PIII. That big cache gave R14K quite a significant benefit in SpecFP2k and similar technical workloads, which is precisely why SGI put it there :-).

Also those weren't contemporaneous systems. The PIII-500 HW availability is 3/99, versus 7/01 for the R14K. A *lot* changes in 2 years in this industry. The best Intel SpecFP2k submission with 7/01 availability was for the 1.8 GHz P4, which scored 631. Here: http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2001q3/cpu2000-20010702-00741.html

-- Patrick