CompuServe Messages

> In raw terms there may be a big difference but if you compare a decently > designed machine against a badly designed one you get some real suprises. > In some tests I saw there were amazing speed differences between similarly > clocked machines (all to do with motherboard design really). Very true. Board quality is a major factor, but I took that into account. When Moto, Intel, and others give a processor speed spec, they assume a "great" board. ie, high speed RAM, good cache, good bus, etc. The numbers Moto released for the '060 were slightly lower than those for the Pentium at the same clock. Real world systems tend to get about 70% of what the published spec is because nobody can afford these "dream" system. The Pentiums can't afford it, but neither can the '060 systems. Of course an _excellent_ '060 at 66Mhz might give a poorly built 120Mhz Pentium a run for the money, but it would take a really _horrible_ design on that Pentium to do it. Most name brand Pentium boards are fairly good designs and the new 120Mhz machines are "showboat" designs to compete with each other. They are using the new burst RAM etc. Besides, a low volume '060 design will have much higher costs to achieve the same quality design. ie, the same speed RAM will cost more in a low volume design. For an '060 to get the same RAM bandwidth as a Pentium gets for free it will have to use either twice as fast RAM ($$$$), or interleave which helps but still raises board costs due to overhead. If you were running a GUI, the user may not notice because how much faster can a menu appear? But running a _computational_ task, I can assure you the 120Mhz Pentium will _SMOKE_ the 66Mhz '060. The '060 has a crippled bus of only 32 bits, and has a smaller cache. The Pentium has twice the bandwidth to RAM, _and_ has a larger cache to make the code run quick, even if the mother board RAM is slow. The worst part is that Moto is not being agressive with the '060s future. They are not even shipping 66Mhz '060's much less 80, 100, or 120Mhz ones. Intel is shipping these speeds today, and will be shipping 133 and 150Mhz ones by years end. It's hard to compete against that. The Pentium has a huge amount of baggage but Intel is spending _BILLIONS_ to brute force it along. ***BIG HUGE NOTICE*** I am _not_ a Pentium fan, I'm just pointing out the '060 is too little, too late, too hot, too expensive. And that Moto has _ZERO_ desktop plans for it. PowerPC is their future and they know it. If you want to compete with the 120Mhz Pentium or entry level P6 in the consumer desktop market, the only chip with a chance is the PPC604. It's fast, and it's half the price per SPECmark against the Pentium. Oh well….. —– Andrew