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Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You?
CitizenC wrote to us with a cool review/overview of the Pentium III and the Athlon. If you've trying to decide what to get, give this a read-through.
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Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade... What's the big rush? My 8088 is doing just fine for me thank you so very much. My Jumpman scores have even been improving lately!
Pentium III 700: $373.
That's about all I have to say.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
AMD is the one I would go for... you can get the 133Mhz Mobo's with AGP 4x and a 600 Mhz K7 for 360! Now thats good price, and the memory is not going to cost you that much either!!
WHEN are they going to come out with the dual processor MOBO"s for the Athlon... thats going to be freaking awesome. I mean thats where hte EV6 should shine.
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
What do you people do on these machines to need that much power? the only things i can think of are servers (which i can understand) or Quake 3 or something. But I don't run servers on my desktop machine and don't play Quake.
I just find it crazy to have 1Ghz chips.
I can see people that could really use it,
but for the general public???
I still think PII 400's are fast as hell.
Is this what getting old is all about?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
The real question is, will I be able to wait long enough to get a "Spitfire"...
:)
It's good to see a review mention "Price" early on. That's a big concern to me. My computer never costs more than $1,100, and I always try to get something better (at least twice as good every two years).
Oh yeah, and I'm buying a new system. But I'm pretty sure my current K6/300 setup wouldn't be able to handle an Athlon.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm using an athlon 700mhz, have been for a few months now, w/ a asus K7M motherboard. I've had absoutley zero problems with this machine under linux, and while not trying to sound like a zelot, nothing but problems under windows. With the pentinum III, I had constant problems under Linux with certian optimizations, yet windows ran perfectly. My geuss is this: It just depends on what your doing. I've got plenty of CPU to go around in the Linux world.. 1405.75 bogomips, woot. However, in Win2k, I noticed qutie offten that the processor useage meter is maxxed when I go to do a bunch of trivial things, like check e-mail, sit on irc, and play mp3's at the same time, however on my 450 pIII laptop, these tasks dont come CLOSE to using all the CPU, and considering in Linux, running X11/XMMS/Pine/Netscape, etc, all at once, my Athlon system reports as having aproximatley 97% CPU free at all times. Sooo... ultimatley, the decision is yours. Mine is this: pIII for Windows, Athlon for Linux.
--- 'dex
WHERE is the documentation on all these alleged Athlon incompatibilities? I keep hearing people say "the Athlon has some compatibility problems" but I have yet to see anyone back them it with specifics. If you're going to make this statement, let's see some facts.
How long will your P3 last? How long before Intel decides to change the packaging AGAIN? Got any failure rate comparisons between the two?
Will the Dual Athlon motherboards require a special SMP Athlon chip or will they work with any Athlon on the market? I'd heard a rumor that the current Athlons have a pin disabled to keep them from doing SMP. Of course, my sources aren't particularly reliable...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The egcs man page mentions architecture-specific optimization is available up to the i486 (and, by extention, the am486). The man page being somewhat dated, I checked the egcs info page and found architecture-specific optimization listed for the i586 ("pentium") and for the i686 ("pentiumpro"). But I saw nothing for the K5, K6*, or K7/Athlon. Am I blind, is the documentation lacking, or does the compiler not include architecture-specific optimizations for post-486 AMD processors?
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
My earlier post..I noticed my link was broken...
oops.
Anyhow, jeffk at somethingawful.com has a full
review on amd vs. intel as well. Although not
as informative as most reviews...he definately
approaches the situation from a different angle.
That angle being one in a completely different dimension.
Judge for yourself...should jeffk be instituted?
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Coming from a family of techies, we have gone through at least a dozen processors in six years. Over those years AMD has been our processor of choice (although we own Intel stock!). AMD has consistantly outpriced Intel, but until recently has always lagged behind Intel in their clock speeds. However, the new Althon chips and AMD's new marketing strategy may undermine Intel's dominance of the market.
True Story: At a computer show, the guy next to me instisted on buying a 400Mhz computer with an Intel ship, even though the price of the AMD computer was $100 cheaper. Why? Intel has managed to market themselves as the processor company. That little jingle Intel has advertisers play is highly recognizable. The fact of the matter is that the people who unwillingly use Microsoft products probably buy computers with Intel processors, simply because of Intel's marketing strategy. (no offense to people who use Microsoft products)
Recently, television commericals for DELL now feature AMD processors. AMD is catching on, now that their processor chips are faster and cheaper than Intels, they should probably start a much more aggresive advertising campaign.
I hope that AMD really become a competitor for Intel; because in the end, competition benifits us, the comsumer. We will wind up paying less for better chips, since the two companies must compete for our business.
BTW, I actaully own a PII-400 now, ending the "family" tradition of buying AMD processors, since I though Intel was going to jump ahead in processor speed. Boy was I wrong!
PC100 or PC133? While it's really nice to have more bandwidth available, most people will never even tax a PC100 bus - it's 800MB/s! The determining factor for me is latency. The lower the latency, the less time the processor has to spend waiting. Latency is the reason why we have explicit parallelism and a half-dozen other methods to speed up the processor - predictive branching, etc. Lowering the latency has a direct benefit on system performance.
The next one is the HDD. How long must I wait to load a program? Having lots of memory helps, but the data has to come from somewhere - that somewhere is either the network or your harddrive. Fast harddrives mean less time spent waiting for files to load. Most people don't know that loading, say, IE5, under windows can load upwards of 50 files! If your track-to-track is 0.8 instead of 0.6.. you're gonna spend a few extra /seconds/ loading those files.
In short, the processor means nothing if you don't have the I/O up to snuff to keep it from idling.
A link, something, anything. What chipset? Any particular AGP version (1x, 2x, 4x)? Specific to certain video chipsets?
If the problems are known, and you know what htey are, you obviously gleaned that information from somewhere. Unless you're parroting what someone else told you they heard from their sister's boyfriend's cousin's father's 2nd wife's boss'grandson.
I'm guessing all of the Athlon advocates in here either
A. Got a pre-built Athlon, or
B. Installed brand name memory.
There's a nasty little secret that I've encountered with the Athlons. You see, the Athlons are really picky with their memory. My friend and I have tried identical memory (PC100, for the record) on an AMD K6-2 350 and an Athlon. It works fine on the K6-2, but it choked on the Athlon. (It booted up, but it crashed all too often) I put back in the memory it came with and the Athlon worked fine again.
He got run around until he found someone who told him what I'm telling you now. I've heard from another person since who has had the same experience. If you're building your own Athlon, or upgrading the memory on an existing one, go with the good stuff. (We ended up ordering the memory from Gateway. - Thus, I can't give any hints as to what to use.)
--Eric
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
While that's nice, an Athlon 700 it's not. The fact of the matter is that the Celerons have puny caches, and thus have a large number of faults, and they share a bus for hitting external cache so they often lock each other out. Thus when running anything that doesn't fit in cache, they spend most of their time locked and idle. I have a dual celery system, for fun, but the performance is barely equivalent to an Athlon of the same clock, let alone one of higher clock.
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In regards to Pentium IIIE versus Athlon CPU--the CPU that you choose really depends the application you're running.
Most new games and multimedia applications usually take advantage of the SSE multimedia extensions on the PIII CPU, so if you're running a games like Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Flight Simulator 2000, etc. you want to get a PIIIE CPU.
An Athlon CPU is a good choice if your game or multimedia application takes advantage of the 3DNow! multimedia extensions of the Athlon CPU, or if you are running applications that need sheer FPU processing power (e.g., CAD/CAM programs).
It'll be very interesting to see what AMD does with the "Thunderbird" CPU due in about a month's time. If they can keep the Athlon CPU core and match it with CPU speed cache, then it will be one VERY fast CPU indeed.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Dell has a huge advertising co-op with Intel. Intel essentially funds their advertising budget. AMD is fighting an uphill battle getting Dell.
It has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with money.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
People don't seem to realize that the optimizing process is highly processor dependant. A program optimized for the PPro will not take full advantage of the Athlon.
A) It can't schedule instructions properly. P6 level chips have one FPU while the Athlon has three.
B) The Athlon can juggle many more instructions at a time, so scheduling again can't be optimized properly.
C) The internal microarchitecture (yikes!) is very different between the two chips. I doubt the same optimizations would work for both. For example, there are two types of x86 instructions to K7 and P6 level chips, direct path and vector path. (at least that's what the athlon calls them) Instructions which can get translated directly into one macro OP for consumption by the K7 RISC internals are called direct path, and intructions that need more steps and are translated into multiple macro ops are called vector path. Different sets of instructions take the two paths in the two different chips, so the compiler can't correctly optimize the code to include mostly the direct path instructions on the P6 without hurting the performance of the K7.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Hold it right there!
I have news for you. The SSE instruction set on the Pentium III CPU is quite a bit different than the 3DNow! instruction set on the Athlon CPU. If you write the app to take advantage of SSE it won't work on an Athlon CPU.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Do you need an SMP system? Then you have to get a PIII. Is 90% of your work done with an SSE-enabled, non 3DNow enabled app? Then you want to get a PIII. This probably adds up to less than 5% of the computer buying public, so the continued high prices and good marketshare of the PIII baffle me. Intel marketing, I guess.
At the moment the Athlon line is significantly (more than a hundred dollars, even including a more expensive high-end Athlon mobo) cheaper at all performance levels, and considering availability of GHz chips the Athlon line has the highest performance level.
Now Athlon vs. Celeron vs. K6II, that's where you've got a few good choices and want to consider your individual needs. Most people today would be happier with a K6II300 and a DSL connection than they would be with a PIII850 and a modem... but thanks to marketing, they don't realize it.