So I've been in the hunt for a low budget home engineering PC. I intend to write code in FORTRAN and run FEM/FEA applications. I suspect that floating-point computation performance will be more important to me than integer computation. So as best as I can tell, the Whetstone GFLOPS benchmark should be the best indicator for my needs in Tom's suite of benchmarks. What strikes me is AMD's relatively strong GFLOPS performance compared to Intel (e.g. Athlon II x4 620 benched 30.3 gflops vs the much more expensive I5's 33.0 performance -- a 10% difference for a 2 fold price diff). So am I correct in relying solely on the Whetstone benchmark for floating-point computation performance? The only other comparable benchmark I've seen is CPU World's Linpack benchmark. Does AMD still place stronger emphasis on FP computations than Intel?
Manny
Manny