[PlanetCCRMA] AMD vs INTEL

[Roger Dannenberg]

One reason to favor AMD over Intel is that AMD handles denormalized floats
much faster than Intel, based on my reading of specs but not on first hand
experience with AMD. I do have first hand experience with an Intel P4 chip
and spent a day or two trying to figure out why my software fell out of real
time after some long exponential decays ran for awhile. The answer was that
when the envelope values approach zero, they become "denormals" and the
multiply operation takes 100's (or maybe it was thousands) of times longer.
There is a lot of information posted about this, including some performance
measurements. I didn't find a general solution to this problem except
perhaps to switch to AMD processors, which have the same problem but much
less so.