AMD Athlon vs Intel PentiumIII
AMD is finally taking the lead over Intel in the high end processor division. The new Athlon uses a Slot A socket that is uses a similiar design to the Slot 1 but the architecture is different, a Pentium III(P3) will NOT work in a slot A and a Athlon(K7) will NOT work in a slot 1 socket. Both the Athlon and P3 use very high clock rates and special instructions for multimedia.
AMD included all the MMX instructions that Intel put into the P3 but the P3 uses streaming SIMD extensions(SSE) while AMD has it's 3DNow instruction set. 5 new ones have been implemented but the K7's high latency doesn't allow it to take advantage of 3DNow as much as the K6-2 and K6-3 did. Both chips have write combining that allows the chip to write to graphic card's frame buffer more efficiently. Memory streaming, also in both chips, allows the chip to interact with caches better.
Although the K7 and P3 are very similiar the Athlon is much faster than the K7 on many areas. Using BAPCo's Sysmark98 the K7's 600Mhz is 10% faster than P3's 600Mhz. Why is Sysmark98 important in computer animation because out of the things it test is Bryce 2, Extreme 3D 2, Photoshop 4, and Premiere 4.2. When tested for converting 2D images to 3D, compression, avi to mpeg conversion, image editing, and 3D game performance the K7 still did better than the P3. One of the most significant benchmarks is the 3D Studio Max r2.5 score, which tests many functions that are in 3DSMax, and the K7 kept on it's track in beating the P3. Also the K7 is 45% faster in rendering scenes than the P3 is which is probably due to the K7's superior FPU.
After all these tests and benchmarks the Athlon is a sure winner for the home computer artist that can afford high a high end system but not a SGI workstation. With its fast rendering time and all around performance a system with it and a high end graphics card a home computer can rival the ones used by professional CGI artists. After you drool about that think about a dual Athlon computer... now that's a 3D animator's computer!