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Hardware

C`t Throws Athlons And P4s In The Gladiator Pit 198

Posted by timothy from the but-they-canna-take-our-*freedom!* dept.
An unnamed correspondent writes: "In the most recent C`T "Computer technik" there is a great benchmark with a pentium 4 (1,5 and 1,4 ghz)vs a athlon thunderbird (1,2 ghz and 1,2 ghz ddr memory with the 760 chipset). If you think that that isn`t a fair race ... then read it now here and here in English. You should get a copy of the German paper version anyway -- great magazine, even beter benchmark. Now does anyone know where to get a 760 mainboard ;-)" Unnamed's cousin Noname also contributes a link to GamePC, which reviews in grand 13-page SE-style the 1.4 and 1.5 GHz P4 chips.
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C`t Throws Athlons And P4s In The Gladiator Pit More

C`t Throws Athlons And P4s In The Gladiator Pit

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  • Re:Pipeline depth and clock rate. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not always true. Having just interviewed with a major company that deals with the different processes and fabs, a smaller line width isn't necessarily the holy grail most people think it is. The smaller the traces get, the more complex the die must become and the routing of the silicon becomes much much harder. Any two wires running in parallel constitute an antennae, so often the traces have to be seperated and/or made longer, so making the linewidth smaller can slow down the chip in some cases.
  • > the animosity towards Intel has been building for some time.

    > And people seem really happy with AMD

    I was an all-intel guy since the 80286 through PPro200.

    What turned me off have been the CPUID thing. As soon as they released their chips with the CPUID, I decided not to buy any Intel chip any more

    Had a lot of problems with my AMDs. But at least, there is now competition in PC arena. I am amazed at the perf of recent Athlons.

    I tend to buy 1 personal machine per year, 3 or 4 for the work, and a couple of ones for friends. Now that intel is trying to fuck everyone with the RAMBUS thing, it is very unlikely that I buy any Intel CPU again.

    Cheers,

    --fred

  • Re:For those who haven't heard... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Intel sacrifices die space for good design; I think this processor actually takes *both* branches of a jump, insofar as that is actually possible. I'm sure it does all sorts of complicated prediction on top of that, too.

    Give me a Transmeta-style design any day...

  • Re:Athlon vs. P4 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, according to an article on www.theregister.co.uk, a 800 MHz or 900 MHz P3 outperforms a 1.4GHz P4... so it wasn't much of a challenge for AMD.... ;)
  • if you honestly believe the k6 series is as good as the p2 or p3 you are seriously misinformed. At first i thought we were a troll, but you probably aren't. most of what you say is correct, but you don't come off all that well when you start out by praising the k6 series chips.
  • I'd like to see how an entirely native system does. Of course, this will be a *lot* more expensive than your average system, especially with the weird RAMBUS requirements, but a lot of people will be happy that it's not x86, and that it's faster than 500Mhz...

    However, my 800Mhz, non-RAMBUS Athlon should last me quite a while, thankyouverymuch. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Buyer beware?


    Most consumers wouldn't be able to tell the difference in performance between the two. Those benchmarks are showing, 5-10% difference when running quake at 150 FPS. If it wasn't for the frame counter/speedometer you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.


    The PIV is clearly designed to go to ultra high clocks, that has been the business. Intel has also done poorly, historically, with first revs of a new architecture. I'm guessing by summer there will be a refined PIV and by this time next year they will have tuned the caching and probably changed the branch prediction hardware enough to eek out that enough performance to sit on top, this is intel.


    The one real thing that article does show is that AMD has put together a very competitive processor. It has been pretty clear for some time but it was nice to see a new generation Intel part come out that didn't destroy everything in it's path. Moore is catching up.

  • yep, alpha can use standard PC parts. ('cept soundcards which have a devious tendency to not implement a few of the higher order address lines out of cheapness).

    Cheap though they are not. In fact they're damm expensive new - you'll never get a 21264 for anything less than 3k.

    However, the previous generation of Alpha can still be had secondhand, even from some vendors, for a much more reasonably price. Eg you could get a 600MHz 21164A for about IEP£1k to £1.5k, or motherboard+chip for about £600.
  • Intel's 1.4 and 1.5 Ghz chips are available from 8 vendors and will cost you between $950 and $1100.

    This is funny... If I looked hard -- even not SO hard -- I could prolly find 8 places in south KCMO that sell an athlon... maybe even at a competitive price to online retailers! :o)

    Of course, Intel shot themselves in both feet (as well as their head) when they went RAMBUS, so no money from me!

    --

  • Correction. The initial generation of P4 doesn't have SMP support enabled. It's not that they're not designed for it (any more than P3 was).

    The issue is that they're focusing on single-processor systems for roll-out. This is for ease of troubleshooting. They'll work out most of the bugs in the single-processor soloution before compounding any problems trying to prematurely release the SMP boards to market.

    But if they did that, you'd want to gripe about how "buggy" their SMP boards were right?

    At least try to appear impartial here. Brand-zealotry makes it too easy for inaccurate statements like yours to be made with impunity.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • He never made the distinction about commodity components vs full systems from integrators. Nor was it important to the point I was making.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • The processor was just released. So arguments about availability are kind of meaningless.

    How available were Thunderbird processors when they were released?

    How available was the Athlon?

    How available was the P3?

    Howabout P2?

    Of course components that have had more time to penetrate the market will be more available.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • At work, I get 4x rate on the mp3 creation, and at home I get 12x.

    4x and 12x compared to what?
  • Well, I don't know what you drive, but my car has a knock sensor and will advance the timing until it detects a knock, then back off until the knocking stops. I always use 93 octane, and I do notice a difference when I get to the track and can fill up with 105 octane.
  • this is a very valid point. I have a system that runs all the applications that I need more than adequately. Even though I am college student taking some CS classes, paper writing, etc. I spend the majority of my CPU cycles checking email, IRC, AIM, etc. If I didn't run distributed stuff would I ever use more than 2% of my CPU? Probably not.

    Problem is this: the man who dies w/the most toys wins..

    A lot of people have a lot of money and are willing to buy systems w/it. They do it to beat the Jones.

    Like someone said before, this was a marketing descision (to run up the clock speed but not the perfomance). People are going to rush towards the GHz machines just b/c of that.

    Just my worthless rambling.
  • no the Alpha is slower b/c it is from 1993 and the fact that it is a known fact that it has an inflated clock speed... I wasn't comparing the two systems I was just listing their keys/s. Plus I wasn't really serious about using it :)
  • I think that RC5 is a good way to determine how fast the damn processor is...

    Alpha 166 UDB -- 184k keys/s
    Intel 400mhz Celeron -- 1.1m keys/s (2.2 for dual :)

    etc.. ;-) I could care less about Quake3 benchmarks.. Quake3 sucks anyway :)
  • Personally, I think the average Joe has no need for all this high-power computing. What it really comes down to is that the average computer illiterate only uses the computer to check email, surf the web, play games, and maybe use apps like Word

    How's that old 486SX holding up?
  • Intel has always been way ahead of AMD though.

    Until recently.
  • IPC = Instructions Per Clock

    For older (read: non-pipelined) machines, you might use the inverse (clocks per instruction or CPI, a 68HC11 might take 3 clock cycles to execute an ADD instruction). It's generally an average over a plausible mix of instructions that would be a significant part of a normal software program.

    Well, how do you make CPI into IPC? First, you pipeline the processor. Theoretically, you could get your CPI or IPC to near 1.0. However, certain things such as loads from memory might require you to wait a clock or two, pausing the entire pipeline. That'll keep your IPC from being big (big generally = better for IPC).

    Okay, great. You did your best trying to get it near 1.0 and you couldn't quite do it. How about starting multiple instructions in each clock? Of course there are complications, you can't do an ADD that requires an answer before the multiply that supplies that answer has completed. So there are limitations. But for many instructions which are not inter-dependent, you can issue them all at the same time. Surprise! Now you can get an IPC > 1.0.

    Yes, this is a grossly simplified answer computer architecture answer condensed in a can, but maybe it clears things up a little.

  • I can't do anything BUT disagree. The more "friendly" computers are expected to become, the more technology that is brought into the hands of the end consumer, the more CPU horsepower it will require. There is no shortage of ways to use the extra bandwidth. Will grandma need an Athlon 1.2 Ghz system to store her recipies? Probably not. But when she whips out that new word processor that is completely voice-driven - with real-time recognition - it's a whole new ball game.
  • A new motherboard and case shouldnt' be looked at as being this huge expense. After all, you had to buy a new mobo when you upgraded from Pentium or Celeron to an Athlon system... And the heat sink may be intimidating, but it won't be the sole factor that a potential buyer changes their mind...

    But as for the price of the actual CPU's... Intel needs to get off their high horse and realize that they need to win back their market share, even if it means not living on 40%-60% margins on their high end chips...
  • But intel is much more successful at convincing software developers to adopt their new technologies than AMD's been, so far.
  • There's no more important set of benchmarks than the holy 3D Game Benchmarks!
  • However, that may be due to DirectX 8.0's P4-awareness.

    Then again, I don't think the nVidia video drivers actually USE much DirectX. The only two other things that use would DirectX as far as I can tell in Quake3 would be DirectInput and DirectSound. Would they make THAT much of a difference?

    Maybe we should benchmark a P4 using an A3D soundcard, thus bypassing DirectSound also.

    :)

    - Ed.
  • Actually, the original intention of my reply was to defend the P4, but rather than blindly saying "THE P4 ROCKS THE ATHLON'S EFFIN' ASS AT QUAKE3! SUCK THAT, MOFO!!!" I was trying to find some reasons for the performance improvement. The fact that drivers may have helped was my hypothesis and was not intended to defend the Athlon in any way.

    I was, in fact, trying to make excuses for the P4. Guess you don't like me doing that. I'll stop now.
  • According to the other poster it's allready been done where it counts in the graphic libs. Chill out some you obvious intel basher, caus its going to happen.
  • I believe what he is saying is that the benchmarks should be optimized for whatever processor they are running on. P4 for P4 and Athlon for Athlon rather than P3(or whatever) for P4 and Athlon for Athlon.
  • The Pentium 4 shouldn't be confused with Itanium, the P4 is 32-bit just like all the other Pentiums
  • You won't like it when the guy dreaming us wakes up...
  • It is hardly fair for them to be releasing Pentium 4 benchmarks as Intel has delayed the P4 chip for "re-structuring." I know many reputable review sites have delayed/will re-do their reviews when the actual production Pentium 4 chips are out.
  • I used to read C'T when I was living in Germany, it's a great magazine full of technical information.
    Can any one recommend an equivalent magazine available in the States either on the "high street" or by subscription? PC Magazine and PC World just don't cut it. Byte magazine was OK but is now web only.
    Suggestions anyone?
    Thanks
  • in europe they use , instead of . and . instead of ,

    since c't is german i would say thats ok.

    john
  • What do you need 64 bits for? To double the stack size on a context switch? 32 bits means each register can hold one of 4 billion different numbers. Thats more than enough for most applications and with those apps where its not enough, 64 bits isn't going to help much at all.
  • A big part of the new P4's strength wont be shown until people start compiling with the new V5 system and using the new instructions.

    The branch prediction is supposed to be about 94% accurate and can be made near 100% with the use of some intelligent compiling technologies. Dont forget the performance on the new SSE-2 instructions as well.

    I love AMD, but they refuse to initiate rather than imitate. Even their plan for a 64bit processor refuses to step out of the path. (64bit with x86 instructions) A vast majority of this site runs linux and are therefor mostly instruction independant. I would think this population would embrace a new architecture if it provided a performance increase.
    FunOne
  • SPECfp, iirc, is designed by the cpu manufacturer. Intel may have done funny things to their compiler, to make it look better. AMD, as you said, may not have cared.

    Most all manufacturers do this, I wouldn't be suprised if AMD had done this in the past.

    SPECfp, for the most part though, is useless. Sorta like the old Mac benchmarks that showed it to be better (ByteMark, was it?). They were written by Apple, and pulled all sorts of shortcuts.
  • You're just forgetting 1 small thing..

    The avrage joe - when he see's a commercial of a major brand selling PC, or an add of Dell - he see's quite clear the animated logo - "Intel Inside".

    This little animated logo makes the differences for the avrage joe. He'll see in the commercial a flashy PC and he will goto the store and buy it - with this little tiny logo that he see's on TV.

    Thats how you sell Intel PC's. Maybe AMD would do this some-day...

  • Well. From what I learned back in grade school, "unavailable" means you can't get it. Period.

    Having it priced beyond your means doesn't make it unavailable. A better term would have been "less readily available".

    I DO agree with the basic sentiment of it though. The focusing on the best price/performance ratio rather than best price or highest rated speed. As a P4 system with the mandatory RAMBUS *GACK!*, easily outpaces an Athlon.....in terms of price.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • Sure, Athlon kicks Intel around the block.

    Doesn't matter. The media is frantically pumping Intel's "next big thing," to the exclusion of AMD's *already existing* big thing.

    It's been most interesting to watch the mainstream (C|Net, ZDNews) suck it up to Intel. Two months ago, they were mentioning AMD about as much as Intel. Today, they talk exclusively about Intel's "to be" chips, and ignore AMDs existing superiority.

    The winner in the chip wars will be the company that best manipulates the popular media.

    Which means that Intel, no matter how badly it shoots itself in the foot with poor designs, poor performance and poor planning, will succeed -- because Intel is a Master of Marketing.


    --

  • There's no problem with defining time_t to be 64 bits on a 32-bit architecture. There can be a small performance penalty if it isn't done carefully, but that's it.

  • I thought my K6-2/350 was quite fast enough - then I installed the latest bloatware, i.e. Mozilla, ...

    VMware is also quite CPU hungry - it's fine for most things, running Windows on Linux on this hardware with 256 MB RAM, but it could still do with a speed boost when booting (which doesn't run at full speed).

    This isn't a trend I particularly like, but it seems to be happening in the Linux world as the GUI applications get better...
  • I figured I'd get my say in about why the p4 currently performs the way it does. All of the arguments I'll make here are based on data from Intel's various spec sheets and documentation on the Pentium4.

    1. Why doesn't the P4 blow away the P3 on normal integer code, despite having double clocked ALUs?
    Two reasons. First, is the issue that everyone keeps bringing up: mispredicted branches causing part of the pipeline to be flushed. At 20+ stages, there's a fairly large penalty for this. I don't think this is as big of a problem as most people have been led to believe. The branch predictor is 33% better than the one on the P3 according to intel, which helps a lot with this. With the use of a P4 aware compiler, branches are also laid out in such a way as to help out the static predictor (in the case the branch is not in the branch history table, or is unpredictable), and the P4 can use branch hints emitted by the compiler or assembly writer. So at least with newly compiled programs, branching shouldn't be a huge issue. With older programs, the improved branch predictor should help a lot. The real problem with the P4's integer performance (and why it performs dismally on RC5 is that shifts, rotates, and multiplies all have increased latencies (although the throughput remains either the same or very close per clock) compared to the p3. So code that expects to get the result of a shift or rotate back very soon is not gonna be happy when the p4 takes 4 cycles to do so. Small shifts can be replaced with a series of adds which have both higher throughput and 8x lower latency than shifts on the P4, but the compiler has to know about this in order to optimize it.

    2. Why does the FPU perform so poorly in some things, and great in Quake3
    My answer here would be that the FPU in the P4 is almost identical to the one in the P3 in terms of throughput, but the operations have a longer latency. So again, code that expects p3 or athlon latency instructions will get a rude awakening. Quake3 (and this is total speculation) probably uses a large unrolled loop of FPU ops that would hide the latency issue, but benefit from the same per-clock throughput as a p3...at 1.5x the clock speed. If you check out JC News (www.jc-news.com/pc) there's is someone claiming that Quake3 has no SSE/SSE2 optimizations whatsoever, so the FPU routines are probably just tuned to get as much throuput out of a pipelined FPU as possible. Use of the scalar SSE2 FPU ops on a P4 (by the compiler, or the assembly writer) can decrease latency while using the SIMD ops can increase FPU throughput. Obviously, Intel has decided to make some tradeoffs here. Shifts, rotates, multiplies are all slower, while add/sub/not/or/xor/and are all faster. The trace cache is perhaps the most interesting thing about the P4, as the x86 instruction set becomes a one-time cost for the core most of the time. It is in essence, a very simple code-morpher (x86 Ops -> cached uOps).

    Speculation time :-) ... I wouldn't be terribly surprised if a future p4 variant started making use of the huge number of transistors available on a 0.13 micron process to do some fairly massive optimization or redordering of code in the trace cache, similar to what Crusoe's code morpher does in software. Intel seems to have finally found a way to remove the "CISC penalty" of IA-32 code. I say good luck to them and AMD both, as long as they compete, we the consumer wins.
  • Digital video is going to be incredibly popular, as it gives consumers the ability to actually turn their home movies into something actually *watchable* (in essence, returning to to what 8mm film offered 50 years ago). Video will chew up CPU, memory, and disk for the forseeable future, thank you very much.

  • There's no problem with defining time_t to be 64 bits on a 32-bit architecture.

    Some software assumes time_t is int. If that were not the case, we could simply define time_t as unsigned int on 32-bit systems (provided systems don't use dates from before 1970) and continue along for an extra seven decades.

    If we just make ints 64 bits we won't need to clean up such brokenness. Of course there is still 64-bit uncleanness (stuff that assumes sizeof(int) == 4), but that will have to be fixed regardless.

  • Hmmm, I remember when the Pentium came out, and 486-based machines beat it in benchmarks. Intel scaled the clock up, and 486-cloners like AMD were out in the cold.

    Then the Pentium Pro came out. The Pentium ran Windows faster. Didn't help the Pentium-level cloners like AMD when Intel came out with the Pentium II and started cranking the clock up.

    Now the first revision of the P4 is being outclassed by AMD and perhaps even the PIII. Let's give a year to see what the outcome is.

    --
  • Intel has delayed the P4 chip for "re-structuring."

    Bollocks, Intel has now released the chip. Officially. Game is over. And yes, at the same frequency Athlon beats the s**t out of it. So as long as Athlon manages to climb up to 1.7 P4 will be unable to beat it.

    This of course does not mean that P4 will not sell. It will. And it will sell like hell. And the fact that it is more expensive does not matter either. Corporate IT is usually ruled by irrational mathematics and the cost and performance are a factor that is inferior to other more "important" ones.

  • Reviews are all over the net now...here is some of them:

    Anandtech [anandtech.com]
    HardOCP [hardocp.com] - on HardOCP's frontpage [hardocp.com] you can find more links to reviews.
    Toms Hardware [tomshardware.com] hasn't got his review up yet, but I bet it will be soon...

    Greetings Joergen
  • Well, well, well.
    The Athlons rule in everything but raw FP speed, where the Intel parts actually win. That translates over to things like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament runing faster on Intel.

    However, the Intel parts have an unfair advantage there, being clocked at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz rather than 1.2.

    THat really means Intel and AMD have equally capable FP units, maybe AMD has a slightly better one.

    If money is no object and all you care about is FP speed, buy the Intel. Otherwise buy the Athlon.

  • > I'm a big believer that, public perception be damned, if your dealing in tech and you lose the respect of the technical community then, over time, you will lose the respect of the rest of the market.

    That would explain why Microsoft is so close to bankruptcy :-).

  • I have a P-II 500 at work, and a Athlon-600 at home. I use Grip and GoGo to rip mp3s. GoGo is essentially LAME with MMX optimization by some nice Japanese folks. At work, I get 4x rate on the mp3 creation, and at home I get 12x. All the time. That's a 300% difference for 20% clock speed difference. Foo! I like my Athlon.

    ________________________________________
  • Ah! That makes sense. Well, 3DNow! beats the pants off MMX, then. Still like my Athlon! :)

    ________________________________________
  • Sounds like you should like your CDROM drive instead. I think that difference is far too big to be explained by processor differences alone

    On the contrary. Each ATAPI CDROM reads the tracks at somewhere between 0.8x and 2.4x, depending on the amoung of error correction cdparanoia has to do. GoGo then encodes at 4x and 12x, for PII and Athlon, respectively. Encoding nearly always finishes faster than ripping on both machines.

    ________________________________________
  • Don't forget that the P4 systems use RAMBUS as well, making the system even more expensive than the Athlon PC133 systems, and Athlon DDR is a big question mark as PC2600 seem even thinner on the ground than RAMBUS right now, hopefully the manufacturers will start to ramp up production soon, then we might see PC2600 on Pricewatch etc.
  • Perhaps someone with some knowledge of the P4 details can answer this...

    I seem to recall from some class that, when you have a deep pipeline, there are benefits from being able to make instructions "conditional". That is, given a conditional branch over only a couple of instructions, it is more effective if you can make the test, set some bit in a register, and have the next two instructions execute or turn into a NOP based on that bit. The two NOPs cost less in performance than the hit you take when the branch prediction fails and the pipeline gets you in trouble. This is also an alternative (don't remember if it's all that good) to spending lots of transisters on branch prediction.

    Anything like this make it into the P4? You'd need P4-optimized code, but hey, that's one of the things I like about running Open Source stuff...

  • I do not believe any "ThunderBirds" ran at 600MhZ.. Think they started at 700MHZ... Since you didn't say Duron, I assume that you have the good ole fashioned Athalon.. Which means that you have a slotted MB, and thus can not make use of the 1.2GHZ socked-A processor.

    But you can get a new MB for $120, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal.. Except that you'll probably want to get PC133Memory (since you most likely had PC100 on that older board).

    -Michael
  • MB's can be very expensive.. Especially when they're in low availability. When the Athalon came out, the MB's were almost as expensive as the chips.. Throw in the fact that they were buggy (since it was all brand new.. including the EV6 connectors). The P4 requires an all new powering structure, so it's possible that we're going to find MB's that blow up the CPU's.. Thus you might want to wait a few rounds before considering these guys (this is usually a good rule of thumb anyway).

    Given that it's brand new, you're also going to be at the mercy of the MB manufacturers in terms of features.. If you like ultra-SCSI-RAID on your MB, it might be a while. There is a similar argument to be made for your case.

    Expect to pay premium dollars for this combo.

    The problem with the head-sink is logistics and ergonomics.. Where do you put everything? Unless you have a monster tower case, you're not going to be able to fit too many full lenght boards.. You have a massively over-heated PAIR of RDRAM RIMMS, a MASSIVE CPU, a larger than normal power-supply.. And then you get to have your first AGP card. A Mid-Tower is probably too small for these guys.. That might not be a problem for some.. But personally, I like stacking my computers, so it's a problem for people like me.

    The heat-issue also means real-estate for lots of cooling.. And an increased risk of heart-failure.. So to speak.

    My guess is that you're looking at $300 - $400 for the MB + case alone. That's more than I usually spend on an entire bare-bones system. Throw in roughly $600 for each of CPU and memory, and you've got a rather large handi-cap for an almost miniscule performance gain.

    As for the pricing of their CPUs... To be fair, they _have_ to depretiate their costs.. It's not cheap to design and entire CPU from scratch.. Remember, that this is their FIRST CPU redisign since the pentium Pro some 5 years ago!! Everything else (with the exception of the vapor-ware Italium) has been an add-on to their old archetecture.

    I don't know what their margins are per CPU - I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100% - But when you take in the cost of multiple billions of dollars, it's not all money in the bank. AT&T use to depretiate their hardware-costs over 40 years.. Intel doesn't have such a luxury.

    -Michael


  • Most of the RISC/UNIX camp are already in 64 bit land, having just emerged from several years of teething pains.

    Check out:

    • Solaris 2.[78] on UltraSPARC II (v9)
    • IRIX 6.[45] on MIPS 10K, 12K
    • AIX 4.3 on Power3+
    • Tru64 on Alpha 21264
    • HP/UX 11 on PA-RISC 8000
    • Linux on Alpha, SPARC64

    In many cases the chip hardware has reached 64 bit before the OS has. Most of this development has been below the radar in the mainstream press because the solutions are not Wintel.

    Extrapolating the story here suggests the Transmeta approach of using VLIW to emulate lower bit width processors can help to compensate for the slow rate of change in OS.

    Also, it suggests there might be practical merit in the AMD K8 approach of abusing 64 bits for double 32 bit processing.

  • Personally, I think the average Joe has no need for all this high-power computing. What it really comes down to is that the average computer illiterate only uses the computer to check email, surf the web, play games, and maybe use apps like Word (I know, but they usually don't get Linux). And all they see is the clock speed, true, but then again they can never really use much of the processing power.

    But the whole performance rating really doesn't matter much once you get past the point of human usability. I mean, unless you're running more programs than you can possibly use at once, who can truely use all that computing power personally?

    Both companies should just forget pushing processors farther and faster, and go for manufacturing. Once they can mass produce those processors, the whole world can have a computer. (Hence, the government has more to worry about ;P )
  • I think it has to do with SSE optimization. While Pentium benchmarks take advantage of SSE, most Athlon benchmarks don't take advantage of 3Dnow.

    Your numerical program in all likelihood take advantage of neither.

    Also don't forget that Intel has far greater resources to make sure all the compilers, etc are fully optimized.

  • Intel's horn has been honked by the marketing & management types now for a while. This is only the latest in the series of disasters that they have come up with. First Rambust, then the P4, then the pricing on the celeron series chips. The pricing here was dictated by the requirement to keep the average ASP up rather than sell chips. They have all but totally ceeded the low and mid market to AMD, and now it looks like then high end is going to go bust too. Quite frankly they deserve it.
  • Windows already has a 32 bit OS they're making for compaq in preperation for intels release of their 64 bit chip ...

  • If only this was the case. It's MHz,or in this case, GHz that sells to Joe Consumer. If the general public bought machines based on the pure speed then Motorola would have a larger userbase with its PowerPC as until recently it ran all over the Intel/AMD offerings...

    So whilst the educated buyer will look at the benchmarks and see that a 1.2GHz Athlon (+760 chipset) beats the P4 1.5GHz in a lot of the benchmarks, the uneducated majority will see that 1.5GHz is a lot faster than 1.2GHz and go out and line Intel's pockets, paying a premium in the process.

  • Wow I thought the Blue Man group was just a marketing exercise invented by drones at intel.
    They really exist and they use Mac's !!!

    So the ad should really say "No pentiums were harmed during the making of this advertisement"

    Next question... Will they come over to Europe soon ?

  • Hmm... lets see. Comparison of Z80 and P3 at 1 MHz.

    P3 has two 32-bit wide ALUs (arithmetic-logical units) and one floating point unit. Each one of them can do one operation in one clock cycle (excluding multiply, divide, legacy instructions and branches), therefore in theory being able to execute 2 instructions per clock (in perfect conditions, perfect pipelining (no mem/reg dependencies) and no cache misses, page faults or interrupts).

    Z80 has just one 8-bit wide ALU and no floating point OR multiply/divide instruction (and yes, it has two 16 bit registers too, but still it's an 8-bit system internally). Z80 is not pipelined, so it has to spend one (two?) complete cycles just for memory access and then two cycles for execution (minimum cycle time being 4 cycles).

    Even in basic situations, at 1MHz, P3 would win Z80 by 800%. But in general each P3 instruction does a *lot* more useful work than a Z80 instruction. If you code multiply routine in Z80, it probably needs at least C+N*8 to C+N*16 cycles (C = some initialization N=number of bits), probably more. Original Pentium needs 9 or 11 cycles for multiply (AMD K5, K6 and K7 have troughput of one cycle per multiply IIRC). N being usually at least 16 and C maybe 32, Z80 would probably be able to do one 16-bit multiply in 200-400 cycles, all modern processors would be a *lot* ahead in this case. Even in case of general code, 1MHz P3 would probably come ahead some 2000%, at least 1000% faster, than 1 MHz Z80.

    But I wouldn't be surprised if Z80 performance per transistor per MHz would be faster than P3's counterpart, though...

  • K6s and Athlons have AMD's counterpart of MMX called 3DNow!, in addition to MMX. Apparently 3DNow! easily outperforms MMX but only a few applications support it. However, one of these happens to be Gogo (which also supports MMX). So, you're not comparing the MMX unit of the two processors. I've noticed the huge advantage of K6 over Pentium when using Gogo, and it looks like it is because of 3DNow! vs. MMX.

    --
  • What vendor is going to go to the trouble of setting up test machines loaded up with your particular applications, just for your lousy $3k?

    No vendor is going to go to this trouble unless you are buying at least a hundred machines.

  • From Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] today:

    Cheapest P4 1.4 Ghz =$920US

    Cheapest Thunderbird 1.2 Ghz = $488US.

    Sounds like a signifigant difference to me.

  • In that case, the Athlon also fully supports either PC133 SDRAM or PC 200 or 266 DDR SDRAM.

    Still Wrong.

  • It looks to me like the floating point performance was the main thing hampering the P4's. As a non-gamer who doesn't do much graphics, but does regularly use the full integer capacity of my computer, I think the P4 was significantly faster. I think they did a lot of work to reduce branch misses, and it paid off. I'd also like to see the further improvement when (if?) we get a mature chipset using RDRAM, as it is a much faster breed of memory. There are issues with it, but because of the immature hardware to work with it, we've only seen the bad side so far, not the good.
  • The Motorola 68K processor, found in Amiga, Atari ST and Mac computers was 32 registers, but 16 bit addressing. I think the 386 was the first Intel 32 bit CPU, probably still doing 16 bit addressing, I don't recall. Still, Intel is *just* rolling out another 32 bit CPU when a serious contender for the home/office 64 bit CPU may just be around the corner. As opposed to the Alpha (which requires some recompiling with FX!32 or whatever) the AMD Hammer will run 32 and 64 bit applications without. Intel's only weapon against this was worked on by HP (McKinley) which would give AMD some competition, depending on whether Intel/HP market this to the lower end of the market.

    64 may seem like too high end and too far down the road, from the present, but the fact is 64 bit systems will be common place, probably in as soon as 3 years. They already exist in great numbers in engineering workstations and servers, from a variety of vendors.

    --

  • Borrowed from Yahoo:

    Intel Set to Unveil Next-Generation, Speedy Pentium 4

    By Duncan Martell

    SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - About every five years, Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - news), the world's No. 1 chip maker, undertakes a mammoth transition.

    After viewing the benchmarks, the world mammoth does come to mind. Old, huge, slow (well, slower than a sabretoothed tiger)

    Granted these benchmarks are not ground to the finest tuning on either platform, they benchmark _is_ fair.

    Why? Because when I acquire software for an x86 platform I'm not getting something tuned specifically for that processor, that memory, those controllers, all I get is an approximation that's "good enough" Therefor, unless there was some specific nefarious activity to downgrade the P4 results Intel is producing a throwback. Should the press be so unkind as to publish Athlon DDR benches and translate it into laymans terms, Intel could be seeing the next big hit on their credibility.

    Chances are, Intel will escape unscathed, as the press are either ignorant savages or too afraid to stake their names to a story to rain on Intel's mediablitz parade. For the New York times to proclaim "so what?" at the bottom of Page 1, would be removing the crumbling keystone from Intel and sending them into the "get serious" restructuring they are so badly in need of. Anyone with doubts need only look at the Merced project to see where a Bay of Pigs mentality took root and manifested itself at Intel.

    --

  • Ok, there was a failed blockquote in there and a bunch of that is my own words, not the original article.

    Begining:After viewing the benchmarks, the world (typo included) are my own words. Sorry about that.

    --

  • Now the first revision of the P4 is being outclassed by AMD and perhaps even the PIII. Let's give a year to see what the outcome is.

    In a year it'll be a 64 bit processor from AMD that'll be making Intel groan. Screw 32 bits, that is SOOO 5 years ago.

    --

  • This depends on the compiler. New versions from Microsoft or Borland should have this option.
  • Keep in mind that C|Net is paritally owned by Intel, and ZDNet was recently acquired by C|Net. No wonder they "suck up" to Intel.

  • just my 64 bits... (Score:3)

    by Admiral Burrito ( 11807 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @07:22PM (#614190)

    I'm hoping someone'll do a price/performance comparason of the assorted 64 bit chips on the market that will run Linux. I'm also hoping it'll push 64 bit processor prices down a bit.

    I'm not a very demanding fellow. I just want 64-bit systems to be everywhere before 32-bit time_t overflows in 2039.

    Personally, I think it's gonna be tight. We've been hearing about 64-bit for a long time now and yet most of us are still stuck with 32-bit.

    And I really hope MS moves their OS from 32->64 in less time than it took them to go 16->32. Wasn't the 80386 released some time around 1987? Past experience suggests that the "fully 64-bit" Windows 2015 will still run some 32-bit code under the hood.

  • Re:just my 64 bits... (Score:3)

    by Admiral Burrito ( 11807 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:42PM (#614191)

    What do you need 64 bits for?

    Okay, I'm no CPU architecture expert, so take this with salt...

    • Some things really do need to churn more bits to be efficient. I know a bit about crypto, and 64-bit processors help a lot there. Bigint ops, as used with RSA and the various ECC flavours, should faster on 64-bit CPUs. Rijndael will be faster with 64 bits, IIRC. The new SHA-384/512 hash algorithm is clearly designed for 64-bit processors and is inefficient in 32 bits. The machines we have now may be fine for GPG and SSH, but how many SSL-encrypted micropayments per second are you going to want your server to handle?
    • Address space. 32 bits can address at most 4 gigs. I realize address space can be increased independantly of the rest of the processor (IIRC there is already a way to handle >4GB), but when dealing with pointers I think it is better to have them able to fit in a CPU register. Otherwise you eventually end up having to make differentiations a la "near" and "far" (I think).
    • Each MOV accomplishes twice as much.
    • Force people to upgrade their "obsolete" 32-bit systems. If people don't spend their money the economy will collapse, right?

  • Re:Benchmarks (Score:3)

    by Chalst ( 57653 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @11:27AM (#614192) Homepage Journal
    There are a small handful of folks there who do benchmarks I trust
    (eg. C't and Ars Technica). It isn't always so easy to do your own
    benchmarks since one needs access to all the sets of hardware you want
    to compare.

  • Re:well well well. (Score:3)

    by maraist ( 68387 ) <michael.maraistN ... m ['pam' in gap]> on Sunday November 19, 2000 @02:49PM (#614193) Homepage
    I don't know if I agree with this.. These benchmarks show that Intel's 1.5 is roughly equivalent to AMD's 1.2, and we were told to expect this by the previewers.

    I believe AMD uses a fully pipelined FPU (multiple ones at that). I'm sure that the P4 also fully pipelined their FPU, BUT, they added several additional stages to the basic instruction as well.

    The addition of stages does two things: first it increases your max clock rate all-else-held-equal. And second it increases the latency for missed branch predictions. Again, all-things-being-equal, the missed branchs will tend to hurt more than the higher clock helps, except in a few special cases.

    Intel, therefore included with those extra stages a highly advanced branch predictor that lives in the MIDDLE of the pipe. More-so, successfully predicted branches can skip the first several stages thanks to the branch cache. Thus, well-behaved code will get the benifit of heavier pipelining with fewer of the pit-falls. To make things even more tantelizing, they're using a 2x clocked Integer Unit. Thus they have a 3GHZ integer unit on these benchmarks. That means that they can further extend their pipelines with almost no visible penalty (even in branch-misses).

    Unfortunately, they still seem to be plagued with branch misses (the only logical explanation for why AMD can still keep up or even surpase them). Obviously the memory played an important role in these benchmarks.. The KT133 v.s. AMD560 really only differ in memory speed, and that was enough to sway several percentage points. A more fair comparison would be between VIA's up and comming DDR-SDRAM P4 chipset.

    But, as was pointed out; if Intel can get the P4 up to 2GHZ before AMD can (last rumor I heard was that AMD was going to hit .13u before Intel), then they can start pulling away.

    Unfortunately, as several sites pointed out, buyers don't look at benchmarks, they look at CPU speed, so Intel should be able to wrongfully win people over on this synthetic basis. Thankfully, the only people that are going to be willing to buy P4's are people needing servers (or maybe even Q3). We'd have to see NT ASP/Sql Server and or Linux+Apache+PHP+Oracle, etc to determine who's king (including memory types). Unfortunately I rarely see benchmarks on these grounds.

    Sooner or later AMD is going to come out with their 64bit proc. With Mustang gone, this is their only next-great-hope. An all new design - hopefully without a tremendous cost - that has started from scratch (as the P4 did). I'm sure it too will have a heavy pipeline, but several of it's new features (such as the flat-memory archetecture) should enhance the playing field.

    By then, however, the P4 will have found a new chipset that handles DDR-SDRAM and will have enough volume MB's and cases that it'll be cheap enough for the hard core gamer and possibly even casual gamer to purchase. A 2 - 3GHZ processor running at .13u is going to be hard to beat. There are no benchmarks for AMD's sledgehammer, so there's no point in speculating about it.

    I totally agree with another poster that said we should be rooting for both Intel AND AMD since competition is good.

    -Michael

  • But about public perception.. (Score:3)

    by Tridus ( 79566 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:51AM (#614194) Homepage
    Intel has a good public perception, but Rambus has a hideous one. I would think that until the SDRAM boards come out for the P4, the fact that it requires dual channel Rambus is going to hurt it somewhat.

    (thats another thing that I find interesting, that they need to use a *dual* channel 800mhz rambus setup to be able to compete witha single channel sdram setup. Thats pathetic.)

  • Benchmarks (Score:3)

    by cluge ( 114877 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:19AM (#614195) Homepage
    The more benchmarks I read, the more I steadfastly believe that you must test yourself. Benchmarks don't mean squat if the machine sucks running YOUR app. Get your vendor to supply 2 test machines, and then pick the better one for you. Oh, and this also solves that "other" problem. The vendors can only get you machines THAT THEY HAVE. Machines that aren't "really" avaialble to the rest of the public for another 6 months don't mean CRAP to the guy that needs his system now.

  • Extensions and Optimisations (Score:3)

    by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @11:47AM (#614196)
    Here's a question I've got.

    I have AMD machines now and when the dual-Athlon DDR SMP motherboards come out (purr purr) I will be getting another one.

    A lot of the benchmarks, etc. claim that certain things are bettered by optimisations, saying that recompiling or rebuilding with P4 or Athlon optimising in place will radically change the numbers.

    So for the Linux/FreeBSD crowd in the know: given that we rebuild kernels, what are going to be the chances that gcc and/or buildscripts are going to support/offer optimisations for either the P4 or the Athlon? I think the PentiumGCC people are working on K6/Pentium optimisation, any chance of it going further?

    I'd hate to think that but for the want of code optimisation options for my silicon, I'd be unable to take full advantage...

  • Re:well well well. (Score:3)

    by atrowe ( 209484 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @02:42PM (#614197)
    Oh.

    So what you're saying is that if I could buy the P4, It would cost twice as much as an Athlon that can beat the hell out of it in most performance benchmarks.

    Thanks for clearing that up for me.

  • This proves it once and for all: (Score:3)

    by djocyko ( 214429 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @11:54AM (#614198)
    Size does not matter!

    (And I was getting worried...)

  • Benchmarks not surprising. (Score:3)

    by Kiss the Blade ( 238661 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:46AM (#614199) Journal
    As I understand it, the ratio of MIPS per 1000 transistors has been decreasing at a rate of about 15% per year since the birth of computing. Fortunately, the rate of increase of number of transistors greatly outstrips this, so processors do get faster. The P$ will not show it's real advantages until it is running in excess of 2GHz, because that is what it is designed for.

    For example, if you compared a Z80 running at 1MHz with a P3 running at 1MHz, you would find that the Z*) does much more work.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • Athlon bad at SPECfp, good on FP apps, why? (Score:4)

    by guerby ( 49204 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:43AM (#614200) Homepage
    I did test Athlon against P3 on my work numerical programs, and the Athlon always won the FPop per cycle game (and sometimes by far!). PovRay and other numerical benchmarks show the athlon winning. But why does the Pentium comes ahead on SPECfp? Better optimizing compiler on Intel side? Cache issues? AMD doesn't care?

    Thanks for any information!

  • Dual Boards (Score:4)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @10:00AM (#614201) Homepage Journal
    They promised us dual processor boards by 4q last year, then 2q this year. It's now 4q this year. Where are my dual processor boards? I WANT MY DUAL PROCESSOR BOARDS! (Shades of the IBM Flying Cars commercial.)

    Ah well. Right now I'm really waiting for Itanium anyway. Once that comes out, I'm hoping someone'll do a price/performance comparason of the assorted 64 bit chips on the market that will run Linux. I'm also hoping it'll push 64 bit processor prices down a bit. I'll happily go for whoever offers me the most bang for my buck.

  • Misleading Benchmark (Score:4)

    by Grant Elliott ( 132633 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:42AM (#614202)
    As the GamePC article points out, a comparison between the Athon's and the P4's cannot be "apples to apples" at present. The P4's have significant hardware changes (such as a larger pipeline) that present software doesn't take advantage of. Since the P4 is "serialized" it really shouldn't come as a shock that the Athlon's performed better in this test. Let's not jump the gun here. Do another test in a few months and see what happens. Besides that, I don't really think game playing is the best benchmark that could be done. Most of the benchmarks involve 3D graphics. Quite frankly, with a processor like these, there are much better ways to use those cycles that would be more indicative of their power.

  • I really think this will end up hurting intel (Score:4)

    by kalinh ( 167661 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @10:55AM (#614203) Homepage
    There has been a strong resentment building up against Intel for a long time amongst the "in-the-know" technical community. Whether you are on an over-clocking site, a gamer site, slashdot, tom's hardware, etc. etc, the animosity towards Intel has been building for some time.

    And people seem really happy with AMD, sure there was a minor flap when they were accused of covering up a bug with their chipset not doing full AGP speeds with Nvidia boards, but over all I see people who know what they are doing with hardware drooling over AMD and raising thier eyebrows at Intel.

    Until now, it's been kind of hard to tell someone who doesn't understand technology why they should like AMD (except for the price). Not every one is willing to listen to a lecture about the evils of unfair patent law and the whole Rambus affair. Not everybody can even understand or care, how schizophrenic Intel as a company has become, shipping chips with no decent chipset support (i820 anyone?), announcing releases of high-speed chips that they can't supply in any reasonable quantity, and ignoring the needs of not only large accounts (I worked at a school board last year and had to fight tooth an nail to gaurantee a supply of celerons for student workstations) but also niche accounts that hold the strength of their image in their hands.

    I'm a big believer that, public perception be damned, if your deailing in tech and you lose the respect of the technical community then, over time, you will lose the respect of the rest of the market.

    I don't think the public has had much bad intel publicity that they can fully understand. However, I think that Intel's move to increase clock speed at the expense of performance will ultimately have a negative effect across all segments of the market.

    What is the message going to be from you people when you are asked about which computer people should buy? It will be, "yeah you could get the intel system, but it's actually way slower than the AMD that costs a lot less too." And the psuedo-experts who read the free computer monthly will pick the argument up and spread it even further.

    And then Joe Lunchpail goes to work and tells his buddies, "yeah, I never heard of this AMD, but I guess they are making faster computers than intel, even though intel says they're faster, so that's what I bought."

    And this kernel of information, meme if you must, will start to weaken the Intel brand and the public's perception of Mhz. It isn't hard to understand. Faster clock speeds are just for marketing. Even John Dvorak could bold that entire line in his zdnet column.

    And for all the PowerPC zeolots, give it up, you can't actually buy those chips yet either.

    I'm not saying that this issue will kill Intel, but it will damage them. It is a short-sighted and ignorant move by their marketing department, how, like most marketing departments, overestimates word-of-mouth when it's in their favour, and underestimates it when it's potentially negative.

  • What I want to know is this: how will these two processors perform against each other in dual-processor configurations?

    The answer is that the Pentium 4s were designed to not be SMP capable, while the Athlons will be using the same SMP architecture that is used currently on DEC Alpha systems, which means that each processor has two dedicated connections to the North Bridge of the motherboard, as opposed to Intel's Xeon SMP configurations, which require all the processors to share bandwidth to the North Bridge.

  • well well well. (Score:4)

    by fjordboy ( 169716 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:27AM (#614205) Homepage
    It seems as though the athlon processor kicked Intel's butt according to the numbers, but there are some other things that put athlon way ahead of the p4....for instance... PRICE! athlon chips are a lot cheaper than these P4s.....also...the p4s require you to buy an entire new system...new mobo, new powersupply, new case, and a new 454 gram heatsink (454grams is about a 1 pound). I think that if these things were added in, there is no way that anyone in their right mind would take a P4 over the AMD chips.

  • Re:For those who haven't heard... (Score:4)

    by scottnews ( 237707 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @11:09AM (#614206)
    I hope you realize that this is a fundimental CPU design. If AMD wants the Athlon to go beyond 2GHz they will have to make a deeoper pipeline. The Athlon has already incresed the pipe from ten stages to twelve. If any CPU maker decides to make a fast CPU it must have something to feed it data. Pipelining is the way bot AMD and Intel solve this problem.

  • Re:Athlon bad at SPECfp, good on FP apps, why? (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19, 2000 @12:33PM (#614207)
    The SPECfp benchmark is a bandwidth hog. The only reason the P4 is faster than the Athlon is because it has a superior memory system. Even a DDR-ified Athlon is not enough. This is not really fair I think. The Athlon has a much faster FPU than the P4 (look at all other FPU benchmarks), but is is much slower at SPECfp. SPECfp is generally made up of huge scientific computation loops, some that were written to be run on supercomputers. This might not be an accurate represenation of floatingpoint programs running on PC:s or workstations. Therefore SPECfp might not be so interesting for most of you. SPECint on the other hand is very representative of common uses of a computer (PC/workstation) and should be looked at more closely.

    Some other answers to your question were really uneducated. SPEC is an organisation producing open bechmarks and the whole industry has a saying about the benchmarks. Not just Intel like someone thought.

    Hope this sheds some light on the issue.

    /peter

  • For those who haven't heard... (Score:5)

    by slothbait ( 2922 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:52AM (#614208)
    A lot of the discrepancy between GHz and performance seen in P4 chips is explainable by Intel's choice of pipeline design. Intel chose to make extraordinarily deep pipelines on the P4 chips, which allows them to crank the clock speed up up up. Sounds great, huh?

    The problem is that it's a bit of a false gain. Most of the performance gained in clock speed is lost again to the serious hit you take at each branch misprediction. If you could keep your ultra-long pipe full, you'd be cruising, but you can't. Occasionally you will mispredict, and have to flush that pipe. One your pipe becomes as deep at the P4, that performance hit starts eating your lunch. Suddenly, most of your processor is sitting empty most of the time.

    So, clock-for-clock P4's get slaughtered by Athlons or PIII's. But Intel doesn't care. They know that the majority of consumers buy based solely on that magical MHz/GHz number. Most consumers are not sophisticated enough to realize that there is more to performance to clock rate.

    This move on Intel's part was motivated by marketing rather than management. They are playing on the uneducated masses. It is all but directly deceptive, and I hope they get their clock cleaned by the press for it.

    Buyer beware.

    --Lenny

  • Pipeline depth and clock rate. (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @12:54PM (#614209)
    I hope you realize that this is a fundimental CPU design. If AMD wants the Athlon to go beyond 2GHz they will have to make a deeoper pipeline.

    ...Or move to a finer linewidth.

    Pipelining lets you increase the clock rate at a given linewidth. It isn't a requirement for faster clock rates in general.

    Sometimes it's a good idea to use a larger pipeline, and sometimes not. For a given linewidth, increasing the pipeline depth will increase the clock speed at the expense of mispredict penalty and hardware complexity and timing sensitivity. Sometimes the increase in clock speed is enough to offset the disadvantages, but beyond a certain point, a deeper pipeline makes performance _worse_. What pipeline depth makes sense depends on your branch predictor, your cache, and a few other things.

    However, shrinking linewidth will always let you increase clock speed, regardless of pipeline depth. It gives a straight factor-of-x speedup of all logic, no matter how the pipeline of the chip is set up.

    I've been studying this for five years, so I have a good idea of what the tradeoffs are :).

  • Which chip will you actually be able to buy? (Score:5)

    by dgb2n ( 85206 ) <dgb2n@@@yahoo...com> on Sunday November 19, 2000 @09:48AM (#614210)
    Its all great to look at benchmarks but a chip that is unavailable scores a 0 each time you test it. There's two reasons a chip is usually unavailable. It is priced well beyond reach and reason or it is being produced in such low quantities that they might as well not make it

    Since the release of the Athlon, AMD's chips are more readily available at higher clock speeds. Right now, there are 4 full pages of vendors selling the AMD 1.1 Ghz Thunderbird. The chip sells for as low as $341. That is an available chip.

    Intel's 1.4 and 1.5 Ghz chips are available from 8 vendors and will cost you between $950 and $1100. In my book that chip is not available.

  • Comparison of pricing (Score:5)

    by Jimmy_B ( 129296 ) <jim@jimrando m h . org> on Sunday November 19, 2000 @10:32AM (#614211) Homepage
    Pentium 4 1.5 GHz: $1099 (Pricewatch)
    AMD T-Bird 1.2 GHz: $488 (Pricewatch)
    Marketing to convince consumers that Pentium 4 is faster: $4 million
    Look on Intel managers' face after seeing sales statistics: Priceless

    ------------------
    A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.

  • Re:Misleading Benchmark (Score:5)

    by Throw Away Account ( 240185 ) on Sunday November 19, 2000 @11:35AM (#614212)
    So, what you are saying is that for a fair comparison, we should run software optimized for the P4 on both the P4 and Athlon, instead of software optimized for neither.

    It's only a level playing field if it's pre-titled in Intel's favor?

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