K6-III and Athlon

[astro]

I was looking around on pricewatch.com today for CPU's. I'm thinking about building a Athlon, but noticed that the K6-III 450 is about 25 dollars higher than a Athlon 650. I thought the Athlon was suppose to be the top of the line. Is the K6-III that much better? What's this about? If a K6-III is as good as a Athlon, I would come out 175.00 cheaper to build a K6-III 400. Is there 175.00 difference in the K6-III 400 and say, Athlon 600. Confused I am. Thanks for replying.

[GIMOER]

Go with the Athalon the K6III is only going up in price because it's being phased out of production.Hence it's become pretty hard to find.

[Wilan Wong]

The K6-3 is getting extinct so that the price of the processor goes up. The Athlon is basically the K6-3 but it has 128Kb L1 cache instead of K6-3 has 64Kb L1 cache. The Athlon has its core recontructed and has a powerful FPU processor that is faster than the Pentium 3.

[oblivion]

It costs alot for AMD to make the k6-3,that is why it is so expensive...also the k6-3 is faster in certain server side business applications.

[wtp]

i think you should get the Athlon because it has a powerful FPU processor, plus, why go for a socket 7 CPU, if you can get a CPU that supporst a mobo that supports 200MHz Front Side Bus. Plus, it is better than the Pentium III. Athlons are also very fast on Windows 3.x Based systems. I don't recommend it for NT or server OSes, i rather get the Pentium III if it comes to getting a server OS such as NT or Win2k Advanced Server.

[Ilya_S_K]

wtp,
may ask why would you chooose PentiumIII over Athlon platform for NT server? I have a progect in progress that will involve a server and a few workstations. I have been convinced that Athlon platform is better for server and workstation environment. Could you expand on your reply.
Thanks, Ilya.

[oblivion]

I would guess that the full speed L2 cache on a pIIIe is faster then the athlons 1/2-1/3
speed cache...........and a xeon......is well a xeon

[wtp]

The CPUs compared were an Athlon 800 and a PIII 800MHz, PIII performed slightly better on NT than the Athlon, but the Athlon K7 performed better than the PIII on Win95/98. Check it out yourself, you'll be surprised. I suppose it's because the processors are designed to do a specific work.BUT, IF GRAPHICS IS WHAT YOU ARE TESTING, Athlon is the way to go.. On NT, Athlon performs well, but if you are an all around person on NT, just go for the PIII, because it scored more higher benchmarks on different categories than Athlon. Athlon just scored more on graphics applications. But Athlon would do better on Win95/98 than NT. It's compatible with lots of Win95/98 games too.

[This message has been edited by wtp (edited 03-16-2000).]

[This message has been edited by wtp (edited 03-16-2000).]

[RobRich]

A k6-3 versus an Athlon is like trying to compare a 486 to a pentium. The Athlon's k7 core is a completely redesigned from the ground up (in no way resembles the older k6 core). It has a completely superscalar design, that features many advancements. The k7 integer unit finally matches the decoding stage with the execution stage, a serious problem with the k6 core (slow decode, but fast execute). The floating point is also now competely pipelined. The actual pipeline latency is still rather low as compared to the P3 core. That means has the same abilities as the p3, but with a lot less lag. The k7 will commonly outpace most p3 setups due to the DEC Alpha EV-6 architecture that is was loosely based on.

The actual performance difference between a P3 and Athlon to the end user is rather small. Mostly that can be attributed to the lower quality motherboards, and the lack of an on die full speed l2 cache, for Athlon based systems. When AMD releases the next gen k7's later this year that have the full speed cache, as well as new chipsets that support DDR ram and SMP, then AMD should pull away from Intel in performance until the Willamette hits the scene. BUt by the time Willy surfaces, AMD should have the 64bit K8 core ready to ship, which should offer Intel some serious competition. The K8 core is actually just an adaptation of the k7 core, so costs shouldn't be extremely high (like the very expensive Merced), and should offer good performance in 32bit software.

[astro]

Thanks to all of you. You have helped alot. I have decided. I'm going with a Athlon 600 with a Tyan s2380 motherboard. From what I've red about it the Tyan s2380 will be the Athlon MB to beat.