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C`t Throws Athlons And P4s In The Gladiator Pit
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.
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...
Hetz (Heunique)
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!!!
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.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
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.
:-) ... 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.
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
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Reviews are all over the net now...here is some of them:
Anandtech
HardOCP - on HardOCP's frontpage you can find more links to reviews.
Toms Hardware 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.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
> 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.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Ah! That makes sense. Well, 3DNow! beats the pants off MMX, then. Still like my Athlon! :)
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
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
-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
-Michael
Most of the RISC/UNIX camp are already in 64 bit land, having just emerged from several years of teething pains.
Check out:
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
;P )
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
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.
Actually i just found an article on ZDnet really panning the P4. Here/A& gt;. Although at the end he said he'd by one just for unreal tournament (800 pounds of chip just for one game) and he's wrong, Athlon 1.2 is faster at UT, but the P4 wins at Quake III (but only with new nvdia drivers).
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 ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
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.
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No vendor is going to go to this trouble unless you are buying at least a hundred machines.
Cheapest P4 1.4 Ghz =$920US
Cheapest Thunderbird 1.2 Ghz = $488US.
Sounds like a signifigant difference to me.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Still Wrong.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
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.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
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.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Begining:After viewing the benchmarks, the world (typo included) are my own words. Sorry about that.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
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.
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.
.13u before Intel), then they can start pulling away.
.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 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
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
I totally agree with another poster that said we should be rooting for both Intel AND AMD since competition is good.
-Michael
-Michael
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.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
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.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
(And I was getting worried...)
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.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
Thanks for any information!
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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 believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
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.
Metamuscle.com - News in the Iro
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.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
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.
The anti-salmon
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.
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
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
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.
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
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.