>... It should
>more or less be just a question of how the AMD performs on specific
>applications.
>Can anyone shed some light on the relative performance of an AMD5x86?
A totally non-scientific answer is that I had an AMD 486/120 and then
later purchased a new P133 system. Almost everything I use the Pentium
for day to day seems almost twice as fast as the 486/120, with the same
memory and a similar video card.
I have also heard people say that the speedup from the AMD 486/120 to
%x86 is not that noticable because you trade the 40 mhz bus speed of the
120 for a small increase in clock speed. (similar to the recommendations
to always choose a Pentium that uses the 33/66 clock rather than the
30/60) I guess it depends on how much difference the 64k cache in the
5x86 makes. The AMD 120 had 16k, I believe, double the original 486's 8k.
It also had a working writeback cache.
It's too bad (IMO) that AMD hasn't managed to keep up with Intel on the
Pentium front. I always prefered buying AMD to Intel, but AMD just
doesn't have anything fast enough for me now, compared to the 386//486
days when they were almost always faster.
--
Artificial Intelligence stands no chance against Natural Stupidity.
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