Criticism
The PR system drew heavy criticism. The ratings were based on a limited set of benchmark suites which measured only integer performance, which the K5 and the 6x86 in particular excelled at. Both processors had weak floating-point (FPU) performance, far below that of a Pentium. Many experts argued that this made the PR-rated chips poor choices for games, any kind of streaming video, or encoding MP3 music.
Others took the opposing view that the great majority of users at that time were performing integer-intensive tasks like word-processing, spreadsheeting and web browsing, and the substantially lower cost of the PR-rated processors allowed the user to afford a higher-spec part in any case. The question remains controversial to this day. With the demise of the Cyrix MII (a renamed 6x86MX) from the market in 1999, the PR system appeared to be dead, but AMD revived it in 2001 with the introduction of its Athlon XP line of processors.
Read more about this topic: Performance Rating
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