Q: pentium 4 slower?

[AndreRIO]

i was another day at circuitcity, and i saw a pentium 4 1400mhz there, it seem slower than my athlon tbird 900mhz. does anyone know why is that? and have you noticed that same thing?

[OuTpaTienT]

That's because performing normal task on software that's not SSE2 optimized, the P4 IS slower.

[sns]

Yes. Earlier on I remember the pc mags being unimpressed with the p4 poor performance mainly because of a ram prob I think (and maybe s/ware not optimised for it & so on). Lately the reviews have been a bit better but they mainly have a go at the vendors for providing cheaper vid cards like the geforce2mx that cant take advantage of the extra processing power. I have not seen a review with a p4 with top of the line geforce2 (or now 3) yet - have not looked too hard though - still too expensive for me at present.
I like my spINTEL chips but I cant contemplate getting a later model until I am satisfied the reviewers are satisfied, the p4's seemed to start off fairly bad in comparison to the later AMD's.

[This message has been edited by sns (edited 05-27-2001).]

[Yar1182]

I think the next generation of the P4 will be a lot better. Rember when the P3 first came out. It was all hype. The Celeron benchmarked higher. When the second generation 18 micron coppermine P3's came out we saw real performance increase. I think the 13 micron P4 will do just as well. AMD will follow with a 13 micron thunderbird also late this year. Things are going to get real interesting.

[eagle1]

I still think the Thunderbirds will be much faster than the P4 (in everyday computer activity -- i.e. Photoshop, and all that stuff).In raw game performance the P4 will have an advantage. When they move to .13 proccess, things will get interesting as YAR1182 says but the Thunderbird will still have an edge...

Great Performance + Great Price = AMD
Good Performance + Not so great Price = Intel

[CMonster]

eagle1 - I agree with what you said but one minor correction in the interest of fairplay - Photoshop 6 is faster on a P4 because it is optimized for SSE/SSE2 instruction set

[Richard_Cranium72]

Speaking of "Optimized" CPU's for specific tasks..

Which CPU is better for Corel Photo/Draw 8 ?


Pee3
Celery o/c'd
Amd whatever ?

[AuraEdge]

AMD's getting SSE soon, in the Athlon 4.
And it will get SSE2 soon enough.
Even though the Athlon as been such a sucess, I dont see many 3DNow! or Enhanced 3DNow! optimized apps.

[Yar1182]

I'm waiting on the benchmarks for the mobile athlon that's out now. Hopefully there will be a moble cpu race as well. I wonder how long i should wait for my next laptop upgrade.

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

I have read many reviews online and in a mag of the p4 vs athlon. The one that amazed me most was the p4 1.7ghz vs the athlon 1.3ghz
Guess who won? The athlon on most but the p4 won on a few (but not by much) video benchmarks. I think the p4 is pathetiic even if it won half of the benchmarks why shouldn't it!!!!! its 500mhz faster. If you were vs. a p4 and athlon at the same speed there would be no contest. not to mention the p4 cost more. more for ****. but they have lowered there prices significantly (uh did i spell that right) Anyway i will try to find the site that I found the article and post it.

[CPUfrier]

Hey u know what. if they made a 1Ghz P4 wouldn't it be slower than a 1GHz P3!

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

Aha! Found it.
the p4 1.7 vs athlon 1.3 http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q2/010423/index.html

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

and here's another
http://www4.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001206/index.html

both have easy to reaD graphs

[emcron]

I remember reading somewhere that not everything can be optimized for SSE2. Is that correct?

[LiLRiceBoi]

right now software is not optimized for the p4. thats why it is slower than current tbirds.

[Wilan Wong]

Intel is just using the higher clock speeds for several reasons, firstly, to mainly to trick people who don't know much about computers, and think "Wow! Intel is offering 1.7GHz, AMD is only offering 1.33GHz, I'll get Intel!". Another reason, why they used the higher clock speed was mainly due to the pressure that they had from AMD, since the P3 couldn't scale that much more than 1GHz (though Intel is going to re-release an enhanced version of PIII), and AMD offered superior performance and could scale up to higher clock speeds than P3 can. So Intel just used "raw clock speed" to try and make up for the performance loss due to the 20-stage pipeline (P3 has 10, the lower the less penalty when the CPU mispredicts). So for clock-to-clock currently, the P4 is much slower, but the performance can be almost even when P4 uses memory-intensive applications that make use of the Quad-pumped bus and the SSE/SSE2 instructions.