AMD's Model Numbers Revisited

[dosmastr]

Originally posted by Tripleshot
It would be nicer if the article could link to more meaningful data that compares performance between the chips both against the competitor and against its own brothers. IE: what performance gains do you get from using an XP 1700+ compared to 1900+, or a P4 1.5 Ghz to a 1.9 ghz, and a real world performance guide comparison between AMD's claims and Intels claims.

according to anandtech, in most applications going from the 1500+ to the 2100+ you will notice a 10% difference in performance.... noticable? perhaps... probably not though....
he says.

unless you study benchmarks and game fps speeds anyway...

unless the game is under say 45fps on a 1500 you won't see a change (it will be there but not able to be seen)

[dosmastr]

Originally posted by wallie_x
I agree with U P4 gamer in that there is no standard metric in which to judge a CPU's performance any more. The reality is that any company will use whatever tactic they can to position their selves to their own advantage. Both AMD and Intel use tactics that are designed to help them get a point across to the public, which both companies view as basically ignorant.

dude... no offence but you and I, and probably most of the people in this forum are a minority.
we know about DDR; QDR; quad pumped FSB's; RAID's and such....

the general public that i know of knows... aol if fun (look at how many members aol has vs any other ISP), intel is a name brand, amd isn't but thier friends and salesmen say its just as good.

i would call the public as a whole fairly uneducated on many but not all things about computers. flame me if you like but when intel kicked out the we have more mhz BS thier stock flew and amd's tanked for a little while. the public knows numbers.... and they are just now learning more... though i agree many people probably would've known that Pentium IV meant Pentium 4 (people are un-educated... not stupid..) and intel was insulting for doing that.. even those who are a bit knowlegable sometimes get uptight and don't think logically so they have to have things explanied to them in sometimes all too condescending manners.... i leave you with 2 questions to prove my point.

"Where is the any key" and "What is a Right Click?"

[YborManiac]

I really don't understand why anyone should choose sides. AMD makes a wonderful processor, reliable, and at a great price. Intel also makes a wonderful processor, reliable, and at an adequate price. If you look at processor prices as a whole, the latest processors from both manufacturers cost significantly less as the latest processors did years ago. Competition keeps prices down and innovation at its peak. The prices for Pepsi and Coke for example have stayed relatively the same for over 8 years -- this is because both offer a premium tasting cola at a very competitive price. Going back to processors, AMD's attractive prices counter Intel's marketing dominance quite nicely, keeping both in the game and reducing their competitors to "second fiddle."

For those purchasing systems, going with a quality processor like the AMD Athlon XP or Intel P4 is a wise choice. Either system will perform extremely well with today's applications and games. Other components should be looked at seriously such as video card (nVidia vs ATI), memory (Rambus vs DDR), hard drive (7200 rpm more important than gb size today), etc. I personally recommend staying away from low-cost processors from AMD or Intel (duron/celeron) as they are significantly inferior to their higher cost cousins. The Duron however has a clear advantage over the Cerelon; the later in my opinion Intel should stop producing outright as the megahertz speed definitely does not equate to this processor's overall weak performance.

Personally, I have an AMD original Athlon 800 system with nVidia TNT2 game card, 256mb SDRAM, and Maxtor 30gb 7200rpm hd. My system is more than adequate for my needs. My little bro has an AMD Athlon XP 1900+, with GeForce 3 64mb vc, 512mb DDR, and a Maxtor 40gb 7200rpm hd. Yes I am envious.

[Ranma]

AMD is still working on the previous paradigm: They want you to use the new processor because it outperforms its predecessor. But because of Intel's dominant position in the marketplace they had to make it look like they were shifting the same way Intel was.

It should be noted that AMD does not have the necessary fabrication plants to create a CPU like the Pentium 4. The Hammer series was explicitly designed to have a much smaller pipeline (in many cases, this translates into a higher IPC) because AMD can not reliably produce CPUs (even if they made their pipeline quite long) at the speeds the Pentium 4 is targeting.

Undoubtedly, the introduction of the Hammer will bring with it clock speeds lower than the fastest XP processor. Comparisons at the same speed would be fruitless, however, as the architectures are so different that it would be metaphorized into evaluating Apples and Mango-Kiwi hyrbids.

[Rugor]

AMD certainly has the fab capability to build chips with a very long pipeline and very high clock speeds. Remember the Athlon XP has scaled the Athlon core to 1.73GHz on a .18 micron process, where Intel's P6 core in the Pentium III couldn't scale to 1.13GHz reliably on that process. Since the Athlon XP could scale to 86% of the P4's top released speed on the .18 micron process there is no reason to believe they don't have the technology to design a chip that had 266MHz more headroom on the same process.

AMD's real fabrication problem is with die size, the P4 is a huge processor. Willamette comes in at 217mm squared, and Northwood at 146mm squared. The Palomino is 128mm squared and the upcoming Thoroughbred will shrink to 80mm squared. Intel has more fabs with bigger wafer sizes, but they NEED that because the P4 is so huge. Intel got a theoretical maximum yield of 144 Willamette P4's from a single 200mm wafer, AMD gets 245 Athlon XP's as a theoretical maximum from the same size wafer. AMD has fewer fabs, they need to get more dies per wafer to compensate. AMD hasn't gone to a chip that big because they can't afford to, and current performance comparisons show they don't need to.

AMD designed their chips the way they did not because they couldn't design one the way Intel did but because it doesn't make economic sense for them to try.

Even so I have a lot of problems with the P4 architecture, but I'm not going to go into them here, and just focus on one further point about processor speed vs. performance. The end-user can't see Megahertz.

I am one of those poor unfortunates who doesn't have broadband. I also use MS Outlook Express to check my hotmail account. Just before Christmas I upgraded from a Celeron300A@450 to an Athlon XP 1800+, a more than threefold increase in clockspeed. Guess what? Outlook Express still takes forever to open. I don't see Megahertz, I see how long it takes a program to open, I see how smoothly my games play or how long it takes to encode an mp3 so I don't have to play hunt the CD whenever I want to listen to music. I can run Baldur's Gate II at higher resolution and more AI updates and it doesn't slow down during complex battles the way it used to. If I had upgraded to a P4 I would have had the same experience. Computer speed is all about application performance, not Megahertz. I'm a geek, I admit it, I care about Mhz, but when I'm actually using the computer I care about how the programs run, not the clock speed.

[wallie_x]

I will agree with Rugor about performance. It's the politics of big money capitalism that frosts my posterior. There is a collaborative effort by some to keep people unenlightened, especially with the MHZ=performance rubric. When AMD came out with the equivalence ratings for their new Athlon XP CPU's the tech world balked. All the bigger techno web sites (ZDNET & CNET) called it a flop. They wouldn't even post benchmarks showing the performance of the new XP CPU's. All you saw was the latest and most expensive emergent technology. All their editors’ pics for desktop machines were either P4's or P3's. But if you picked up any magazine like 'Computer Shopper' put out by Ziff-Davis a.k.a. ZDNET. you could at least have some raw benchmark comparisons of top of the line Intel and AMD machines. The joke was that the Intel P4 machines were still having difficulty beating the old 1.4ghz Thunderbirds. The Athlon XP machines smoked the P4's in almost all benchmarks except (of course) memory bandwidth. But some how the P4 machines, even with worse overall performance, were still the editors picks in Computer Shopper. Why? Big money is in bed with big money. Even at the cost of deceiving the genral public with misleading information.

[$1500-P4 gamer]

wallie_x
"Big money is in bed with big money. Even at the cost of deceiving the genral public with misleading information."

And what prey-tell is AMD?Big money,yes!They are both evil!I've heard AMD non truths just as Intel.I trust neither one and rely on reviews and such for the real data.You are right though,it is sad that the avg. person is swayed by mhz alone.But this is how it is unfortuneatly.

On the one hand you have Intel boasting high mhz=just as high performance.We techy's know this to be not true but the avg. pc user is easily fooled.

On the other hand you have AMD.Who uses a rateing system of their own as to LOOK better to the buyer.We know better but the avg. pc user believes a XP2000+ is 2gig.

You see both are trying to appear to be what they are not.Looks are disceiveing-so are names and chip rateing systems.Two wrongs dont make a right.Both co.'s are wrong as we are the only ones getting shafted in the whole false advertiseing thing.It is all about pushing there co's stuff.On commercials you see lies from both.The AMD late night Info-mercials are trying to sell there systems under false claims.They will say it out performs a Intel at everything,even printing and dial up.Say what?When a printer is faster than the Pc. you will notice a dif. between cpus.But as today the cpu(all brands)is way faster than any printer and a Intel P4 1.5 vs. AMD XP 1600+ will make no dif. on dial-up either.

Intel also claims such things that are not true.Like the net being faster.Again I say what?

Point is AMD is better at some things and Intel is better at others.It is dependant on your needs.I like games and such as well as with my past Intel experiences I made my choice.Though it is not the right choice for others.There is as of now no one all around chip that dominates in every area and hopefully there will never be again!Can you imagine what this Super all around winner of a beast would cost.Lets not even go there I say.

[wallie_x]

P4 Que Paso? My point was that at first both those so-called techno web sites didn’t even give the Athlon XP the time of day. All of us who own Athlon XP’s, who have been previous T-Bird owners, know what an improvement the XP is over the Thunderbird. It runs much cooler and my XP has performed flawlessly coupled with a Sis 735 chipset and Crucial 2100 DDR. The point is: Americans sometimes prefer fads to reality. I thought ZDNET & CNET’s minimalization of the real performance of the Athlon XP was appalling, if not out and out demeaning of AMD(aside from the Cyrix MII equivalent ratings gambit). As I remember Intel’s Mhz = performance was stinging sales of AMD CPU’s. They had to try something; and I think they were justified.

[AlabasterFrog]

I think the issue is not if AMD's chip performance rating are meaningful - from what I've seen they are actually very conservative - the problem is that the general public uses MHz or the performance rating as seemingly the only important factor when buying a computer. To me, this is like car shopping by only looking at the horsepower (my F-150 may have 260 HP, but I'm not going to win many drag races with it).
The general public seems to focus only on the Mhz and assume all else is equal. Big OEMs know this, and exploit it to their advantage. I have to wince everytime I glance at a Dell (er, I mean "InDell") ad to see them touting the "blistering fast" performance of a 2.0 Ghz P4 saddled with a old Gerforce2 MX200, SDRAM and a 5400 rpm hard drive.
All the other major manufacuters are just as bad. I work as a product rep, so I have the misfortune sometimes to see this in action at some retailers. At a Best Buy a couple of months ago a guy came up to me and asked if a system he was buying would be good for games (a Celeron 1.2 Ghz with an 8 mb integrated Intel video card; he also had a copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein). As I kept trying to explain to him that the video card was going to kill his performance, he kept stammering "but it's 1200 mhz!"
Sad.