Hmmm... OK :)

"I'm sorry, but that bit of marketing on the website doesn't support your claims:
They didn't just recompile with an Intel compiler. They worked together with Intel personnell to change the DLLs. (If recompiling for P4 optimizations is such a trivial task, why did they need to work together with Intel to do it?)"

I don't see anything on there that indicates hand optimization - nor do I find any references on the 'net to hand optimization being necessary for P4 optimization. I would be happy to look over any references you might have to that being a requirement for significant gains.

"BTW 5 to 30% performance increase isn't even all that much. Simply using a better compiler can already give you 10%."

I'll take it, thanks :)

"And Intel has very talented programmers that have realised such performance gains just by optimizing code without making use any specific P4 or SSE parts."

Intel just plain has some talented people. That is why I am always amazed when folks assume those same talented folks are being purely driven by their marketing department into making silly choices :)

"Those programs you have that have some sort of optimization (that's actually noticable, and not just marketing) are very likely all much more expensive than Poser4 or Poser5."

Well, yeah. That was sort of my point. For the higher end uses that we put these systems too the P4 is a good choice for us... the chip is fast and the quality is good, it comes from vendors we like and the optimizations exist is all the software we use that it would matter in.

BTW - that is not the only circumstance for the gains. There has been a bit of stir in the Linux community because some projects are advocating the use of the Intel compiler over the GNU compiler set because of it's superior performance ... especially on P4 chips.

The P4 is a chip with a LONG pipeline and some interesting instruction choices - it needs to be paired with a compiler that knows what to do to make it hum along - fortunately Intel has built one.

"For relatively low-cost programs like Poser the situation is quite different."

The stuff I see on the net and the experiences of a number of developers say something else. That significant performance gains are possible simply with a  recompile.

"Quake3 is a very interesting case. The GAME is very much optimised for the P4. (Again with help from Intel programmers). The performance of the P4 with the game is stellar. But the ENGINE apparantly doesn't have that much optimizations. Because in all other games that use the Quake3 engine, the P4 doesn't perform nearly as well as with the quake3 game. In fact in most of those games it loses to the Athlons."

Yup, it is interesting :) Especially because Quake 3 is completely bound by it's rendering engine for performance. There is no AI to speak of and almost no housekeeping done. The performance is totally tied to the graphics engine. The fact that it performs so well under the P4 is a useful pointer to what is possible with that chip and a smart development team.

The fact that those folks who license the engine manage to sacrifice that advantage speaks of them more than the chip :)

".NET has very little to do with CPU optimizations at all."

Actually, this is not entirely the case. >NET software (we are developing a number of programs under it) makes heavy use of the runtime environment and libraries provided by MS. Since those are P4 aware and optimized the software that sits on them is also optimized that way. This would be true for a Athlon optimized version if one existed.

As more software is developed on this framework, more software will see the benefits. Simple :)

"I buy a CPU for the programs I use NOW and not for future optimizations."

So do I :) And the programs we use most often are P4 aware. The performance is on par  or faster than the Athlon parts and the systems come from vendors we trust (a whole other discussion). As there is (for us) no disadvantage to running the P4 we are happy to do so.

As for the future, we keep systems in service for years... I see no reason not to bet on the industry leader and take the advantages as the come later, in addition to the ones we get now :)

"Right NOW for Poser4 the P4 is clearly not the best choice."

While I can agree that there seems to be a slight advantage to the Athlon XP at a similar clock speed for Poser, the benchmark also (as you mentioned) shows that Poser is extremely sensitive to other issues - the wide disparity in performance across machines of similar CPU is a critical clue.

Long before I would worry about my brand of CPU for Poser I would worry about the other factors that seem to be so important to it.

"We'll see what happens when Poser5 finally arrives."

Given the dramatic change sin the rendering system and soft body dynamics that have been hinted at, I think we can see that Poser 5 will have to be a more gown up piece of software. They will no longer be able to ignore the hardware acceleration available for previews and they will be using good compilers for the system.

Me, I would LOVE to see Poser 4 compiled with the Intel compiler... just to see what happens :)