Intel P4 2.2 cpu slower than P3 1.2 ghz (DOS)

[Tom Eldredge]

Gentlemen,

I am very puzzled. I am trying to match the speed of an Aopen motherboard,
running an Intel P4 processor under Power basic 3.5 for Dos. The program runs my
machine at a noticeably slower speed. I have also tried celeron cpu's running 2.4 ghz
and 2.8 ghz. They all run at about the same speed, which is slower than the P3 processor
ran at 1.2 GHZ.

Has anyone else seen this? Is there anything I can do about it?

Would a 3.0 GHZ P4 be able to catch up to the 1.2 Ghz based system?

Everything else is the same, except the memory on the P4 is also faster.

I hope someone has some answers. I need about 10 of these mother board/cpu combinations, but can't
find a good supply of P3's.

Tom Eldredge

------------------

[Criss French]

Hi Tom, I'll take a guess.

I remember over on Darek's Secrets there is
some very good history explaining the P3 vs. P4 saga.

There was a lot of industry fuss when Intel decided to re-define
x86 achitechture with the P4, and threw out the P3 machine code
optimization strategies. I think there were even specific P3
code tweaks that made the P4's stumble. The thing is, if something
in the machine code is invalidating the instruction pipeline on
the P4, then it will stumble badly. The p4's strategy is to use
a super fast pipeline (trimmed down feature set) to deal with very
extreme Hz. Combined with suitably optimized code (so it keeps flowing)
it can really cook (look at the newest benchmarks, tight optimized
code like video encoding screams). But don't make it stumble.
That's why the AMD's do the same overal work at much lower Hz,
they don't stumble, the code doesn't have to be perfectly tweaked
like the P4.

So I think you should try AMD's, which to my knowledge still do better
at general x86 (un- or P3 optimized) code than P4's do.

Try it out and see. You might get lucky.

Right now AMD socket 462 boards and CPU's are STUPIDLY cheap,
and even the new Sempron chips are very fair performers, so it
wouldn't be a bad solution if it fixes your problem.

Good luck.