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Here's a little performance table:
SpecINT Spec FP92 Mhz Cache
Mips 3000 27.3 29.3 40 0+128k Dec 5240 numbers
486/66 32 16 33/66 8k Intel announcement*
4000PC 35 34 50/100 8k+8k Sgi periodic chart
4200 55 30 40/80 8k+16k? Nec Broshure (no details)*
4000SC 60 58 50/100 8k+8k+1MB SGI periodic chart
Powerpc 60+ 80+ 66 32k Motorolla ad *
Pentium 64.5 56.9 66 8k+8k Intel announcement *
R4400SC 97 88 75/150 16k+16k+1MB SGI periodic chart.
IMHO anything at the 4200 performance level or above looks great to me.
Question is how does the 4200 get it's speed? It running 20% slower then t
he
mips 4000PC, and supposedly has longer pipelines, and less fp support.
Posibilities are
- longer pipelines
- bigger on-chip cache
- different process, since it is a low power 3.3V part
- different 'C' compiler used for marketing purposes
- extern second level caches
Is it possible it supports a second level cache?
At the 4200's price, and the PC's price, I rather doubt that it has built in
support for a second level cache.
Or it it just above a very
important 1st level cache threshold that gives it twice the perfomance of t
he
4200 for this benchmark? (I.e. in real world not faster then the 4000PC)
Could be.
Or was the 4200 paired with some custom memory subsystem that implemented
a seperate cache controller for the 2nd level cache?
Could be.
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