Slashdot Mirror
AMD To Hide MHz Rating From Consumers
pezpunk writes: "Tom's Hardware is reporting here that AMD's next-generation Athlons will be identified by model number rather than Mhz rating. This means that an Athlon will be designated an "Athlon 1600" even though it's only a 1.4Ghz part. The true clock speed of the chip will NOT be shown either on the chip itself or even in the BIOS. Apparently, they're desperate to compete with higher-clocked Pentiums in the minds of consumers -- proof that even the underdog can pull dirty marketing tricks =("
Don't they already have a P rating or something of the sort? It's from way back when they did the k5's I believe.
It makes sense to me. Lower MHz Athlons are always compaired to higher MHz P4's in benchmarking and stuff. It just proves the MHz isn't everything.
Which is the marketing scheme? The faster MHz? Or the better chip????
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is an old trick.
Remember the Cyrix Pentium-class CPU's?
The P150+ was actually a 133Mhz chip that performed (in integer comparisons anyway) like an actual Pentium at 150Mhz.
Their floating point sucked, though...
-l
The one problem I have with this is that it'll make it even easier for underhanded businesses to rip off their customers. AMD and Intel are already fighting that battle, where businesses sell overclocked CPUs to their customers, insisting that it's a 1.2Ghz instead of a 900Mhz@1.2Ghz. Now, how are we to know? How can we be sure that the 1.4Ghz we buy is really a 1.4Ghz and not just a 1Ghz that'll work at 1.4 (with lots of arctic silver and HSFs)
What next? Car model names? Oooooh the AMD "Mustang SHO"! Buy one and get laid everyday! Howzabout the AMD "Shilznatz" for the Thug in us all - faster than a Glock 380.
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
In the day and age of M$ dumbing down of consumers, AMD is going to try to wipe out Intel's market by making their chips "user-friendly" by making them name brands as opposed to specs. I wonder how long it's going to be before Cyrix comes out with "Mr. Happy Chip"?
JoeLinux
All things are possible, save skiing through a revolving door.
I fail to see how this will help. It seems to me that it will only confuse the consumer. You take the one piece of data that the average buyer uses as a benchmark (the MHz rating) and completely obscure it.
It seems to me that the consumer would be better served by AMD advertising in plain language why their chips are better than the competition's.
Look at it this way, if you went to the gas station and the pumps were only listed as "Formulas One, Two, and Three" instead of octane ratings, you'd likely buy the cheapest one instead of the one best suited to your needs.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I suppose that will still work correctly right? Isn't that taken from kernel callibration routines instead of BIOS?
On my Athlon 700:
cpu MHz : 700.044
What would do AMD a world of good would be to reconcile whatever problem it is that they have with Michael Dell and go about getting Athlons loaded onto Dell machines. They are essentially blocked out of the top spot because the #1 box maker refuses to use the chips.
They could of course go the other route and try to get loaded across the board on lower-end machines (e-machines, etc), but that wouldn't do wonders for their image.
All your PC's are running at HZ not MHZ all this time!. We've just been telling you and your damn fool BIOS otherwise.
And you believed it! What suckers! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
CPU clock speed is a misnomer anyway. How the chip functions and what it does is far more important than how many cycles you can squeeze in per second. And I'm sure that those who REALLY want to know will be able to find out if they must.
If it helps AMD get the market share and laurels they seem to deserve, great! Maybe it will force Intel to be more innovative in their architecture design sessions than they are in their marketing sessions.
While I agree Mhz isn't everything in a processor amd is still using these model numbers to be in line with Intel mhz, very confusing for customers.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Oh no! Not another 6x86 PR200!
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
It's not really that bad of a "dirty trick" since an 1Ghz Pentium Processor and a 1Ghz Athlon Processor are not exactly equal... but because they are both "1Ghz" they ARE equal in the minds of many consumers.
Benchmarks usually place the like-clockspeeded Athlon at slightly faster then it's Intel competitor... but it becomes hard to market that.
Hiding the clock speed from the BIOS though... going a bit too far.
Also, whatever 'P' rating you rate it at is meaningless. An Insel chip may be faster at integer math, slower at memory access and floating point while an BMD chip may rock at floating point but be terrible at other things. Plus, are we comparing against the PQ3 or the PQ4 Insel CPU?
No, keep the information about Mhz right on the CPU. Ideally, keep the FSB and multiplier as well. But just don't use this as your selling point.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
AMD should go for this all they way! After all, we all know how well trying to hide a chip's REAL speed rating worked for Cyrix! oh, wait....
From my
localhost# cat/proc/cpuinfo
Mwaahahhahahhaaaa!
Person A: Hey, I just overclocked my Athlon!
Person B: Cool, how fast is it now?
Person A: Um... Actually I don't know.... Faster I guess
Seems to me that a marketing ploy like this will not work against a marketing giant like Intel...
Intel will simply exploit the fact that the Athlon "1600" is not a 1600Mhz chip.
The average consumer(read non-slashdotter) will see the "True" 2000 beside the Athlon "1600" and will obviously go for the higher numbered chip.
Apple has tried to educate the consumer about the reality of clock speed, and they failed. What makes AMD think they can achieve a different result?
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
I've been wondering about the Hz Myth issue for quite some time now. Mainly ever since Steve Jobs at MacExpo NY a few months ago where he demo'd some machines that smoked Intel chips despite being about half the MHz. Do note that this a long post, and had it pre-written waiting for the next oppurtunity to post it. I feel this is that oppurtunity.
I heard a rumor that Intel counts both the rising and falling edge of the cycle, while Motorola counts only the falling edge. This rumor was in respect to how Apple's chips were always considerably lower in Hz than Intel chips, primarily in how Apple's chips were half as fast as Intel's. (Motorola designs and manufactures Apple's CPUs)
A co-worker and I discussed this and did some analysis. The guy was an EE in college, and said that actions were performed only on the falling edge of the clock cycle. Hence, it was not possible to include both falling and rising edge in a clock cycle.
We took a mathematical algorithm, wrote an implementation in C, and added some timing code. I should note that this C program is a _typical_ complex math algorithm that could occur on any machine, and are not tailored to perform better on any given machine. We compiled the source using gcc 2.95 on a Red Hat 6.2 box with an Intel 1 GHz Pentium III and also on a Mac OS-X using the same version of gcc on a 500 MHz G4. Both compilations used full optimizations. We then ran them on their respective machines (using the same input) several times each and calculated the average amount of time it took for the algorithm to reach completion. The results were about the same for each machine.
After reflecting on this result, we think that Intel is using both the falling edge and rising edge in an attempt to better market their products. We arrived at this conclusion by going back to classical wave mechanics from our physics classes in college. Take a waveform, say the trignometeric sine wave for example, and notice how the wave rises for the first pi/4 on the X axis. It repeats this shape 3.14 later. Hence the wavelength of the sine wave is pi. By definition, the number of complete waves in a given second is the frequency of the wave.
Apply this now to the waveform of a circuit. Specifically, the clock. Notice how the frequency of the wave is composed of both a rising and falling edge. If actions can only take place on the falling edge of a clock cycle, then Intel has doubled the clock speed on paper only.
But wait! You might be asking why have AMD's chips also been comparable to Intel's in terms of clock speed? Because AMD is directly competing with Intel, and they need that edge in the market. Assume you're a regular Joe Q User, would you buy Intel's 2 GHz processor or AMD's 850 MHz? Our conclusion is AMD has also doubled their numbers in order to better compete with Intel.
But wait again! What if Intel has figured out how to get actions to occur on both the rising and falling edge? If this is true, Intel's chips would perform _largely_ better in benchmarks than they currently do. If this was true, the timing test my co-worker and I performed would not have resulted in similar numbers, it would have had Intel getting a timing roughly half that of Apple's. Therefore, if this is true, Intel's engineers have done a lousy job at exploiting this novel concept, which I highly doubt would happen. Our conclusion is that Intel hasn't figred out how to have actions perform on the riding and falling edge.
Final Conclusions: After doing some scientific analysis that includes benchmarks and revisiting concepts learned during a college physics course, we conclude that Intel is counting both the falling and rising edge of a clock cycle, despite facts that fail to support this idea when compared to a processor that is measured using only the falling edge.
Companies like Apple and AMD are doing the correct thing by wanting to find a better means of quantifying the performance of a processor. They are doing the correct thing by telling consumers there is more to a processor than it's clock speed.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
We all know its not the megahertz but the BOGOMIPS that count anyway ;)
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
In other news, AMD has changed its company name to Cyrix...
(BTW, the link above is actually a pretty interesting diatribe about why Cyrix's performance ratings stunk.)
Do not taunt Mr. Happy Chip.
Mhz or Ghz is somewhat meaningless when used to determine the "speed" of the CPU anywas.
While I don't mind them using another number to identify the CPU, I'm not sure if its a good idea to use "1600" on a 1400 mhz CPU because their marketing department feels its as fast as a 1600 mhz Intel P4.
I don't think clock speed is important. It should be printed on the computer box someplace but it doesn't need to be part of the marketing or product name.
Clock speed hasn't mattered to me since about 100MHz. Just get a current PC, and your computer will be fast enough for the popular applications (MP3 for instance).
Of course power users will care, but average joe doesn't..it's hard to compare MHz to MHz these days anyway.
After all, it has been done before, and even by AMD (K6
But I reckon AMD will lose far more in goodwill than they will gain in sales for this. Also, to use the stated example, what difference does a percieved 200Mhz performance difference make anyway with the applications most people actually use?
Prediction: This won't happen. The net is full of very bad PR at the moment because of this "rumor". AMD, which might well be in an advanced stage of planning this out, will realize that this sucks, retreat and try the only sensible thing instead; plain information.
Gawd I hope I'm right.
And what's up with the Palomino problems? That sucks even more by the sound of it.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If I don't know what the clock speed is on my chip, how am I expected to set the jumpers on my motherboard?
FreeBSD's boot process will still tell how fast :-).
it is clocked
I am sorry to see AMD is using this change in branding to confuse consumers, but this has to happen eventually. Consumer products are advertised based on what they can do for the consumer. No one buys a Whirlpool 1600RPM washer, they buy the Calypso, because it's so much fun and good for you laundry too! Muscle cars still tout their RPM's and cylinder count, but this is due to the egos of those purchasing such cars.
The truth is that MHZ doesn't matter for the vast majority of consumers. Any computer 800 MHZ or faster is probably bottlenecked by the software and hard drive.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Comparing by MHz between chip architectures is fairly meaningless. Athlons have always performed the same as an Intel chip running at about 100 MHz higher. I think they are trying to not fight the uphill battle with the unwashed masses that believe that clock speed means everything.
Wouldn't this strategy defeat the purpose of this ruling? Those same questionable vendors can come out of the wordwork, and say that they just sold you a 1.4ghz AMD chip, when in relality, you've just got a 1.2ghz overclocked to 1.4ghz? Without the ability to see both the chip model # *and* the chip speed in the bios, it will be very hard to proof that you get what you ordered.
I agree that stupid consumers are infactuated with high clock speeds that lead to this problem, but AMD chips, from my experience, seem to stand on their own in terms of quality and performance compared to Intel, and need not hide behind this strategy to effectively compete. Besides, if anything, they have to woe the OEMs and not the ones buying speciality-built computers, and last I checked, many of the OEMs are still Intel-based.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
We still have the ever useless BogoMIPS! Once someone finds out the mhz/bogomips multiplier for the new generation athlon, clock speeds'll be easy to find.
Wow... I'm amazed Intel hasn't done this yet. Surely AMD will rule the planet now.
*sigh* Seriously, AMD just kissed it's future good-bye. Dead in two years, tops. They're already cutting prices too thin, and what with the entire sector dumping jobs like crazy, AMD could be facing the last roundup. I'm sure it's already packed for the trip, with this little stupid stunt.
Most motherboards support chips of different speeds. I suppose the BIOS seting could be ask for the chip model instead of frequency. But, why should motherboard manufactures keep silent about the frequency? Especially if they want to give more sophisticated consumers the ability to overclock.
...consumers can't get it through their heads that clock speed is not even close to being everything. Intel has proven a willingness to more or less lie about the speed of their processors (got look at some Tbird vs P4 benchmarks and tell me I'm wrong there).
As long as the public continues to see things based solely on the clock speed, AMD can't win unless they:
1.) try to educate consumers better (not gonna happen because cpu design is complex)
2.) fight dirty and do Intel's tricks right back to them.
I'm not too happy about it either, but there's little else AMD can do. At least there's one good thing: it's only a model number. Unlike Intel, they're at least not lying about clock speed.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I can't say that I disagree with their inclination to not want to use MHz, when it doesn't mean anything; even less now that the Pentium 4 is up to 2GHz. Talk about bloat.
I don't agree with their attempt to give out these "model numbers" that looks suspiciously like higher clock rates. Cirix tried the same thing a while back. It only confused people in the end and (IMHO) increased the consumer's reliance on MHz as the single metric on which to base purchasing descisions on.
We really need a good benchmark to comapare these, but that is a very old story....
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
so show us the writer's guide, man. Don't make specious claims and wave your hands at a source. If there's a document, let's have the URL.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Since when is this a dirty marketing trick? I believe that this is the right way to go since the mHz myth really only benefits Intel at this point. Maybe Apple should also follow suit? Maybe both of the companies can convince consumers that mHz is not the true benchmark of a machine's speed....
and failed.
Remember the MediaGX chip? It ran at a slower clock speed than a "comparable" pentium. However, real world experience showed that the Media GX chip ran slower than almost all its competition.
Please don't get me wrong, I own an Athlon 1200C and love it. I just don't think this is going to work.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Good 'ol big blue has been playing the same game as well...
I bought a 20gig Deskstar HD, and was humoured to see that it was called an IBM Deskstar 60GXP. Misleading? naw. everyone can see that something called a 60GXP _must_ be only 20gigs
I guess this will put the requirement on hardware reviewers to tell the consumers at least approximates of the processor's speed. If no place else, they should be able to, and some even get + give the speed of the processors before they come out.
And, what will this do to overclocking? if you don't know how much you're OCing it...... (note: I haven't really done any overclocking, so I don't know if most do it by mhz, frequencies, or whatever else.)
-DrkShadow
Sounds like Apple and their "MHz Myth".. oh well, hopefully people will see the light. In AMD's favor that is.. ;)
This clearly isn't the first time they've done this. I remember the 5x86 chip that was actually an overclocked 486 clone. People who bought it were honestly tricked they bought a Pentium 133, when in fact it delivered performance worse than a Pentium 60.
The whole pr rating scheme is nonsense. That's like saying my Canadian dollar is worth 1 PR American Dollar. If AMD sees this as a problem, then why not send retailers marketting material such as benchmarks to backup their support of the Megahertz Myth. Tricking consumers just ends up putting your face on CNN (or Slashdot).
Arrrrggg, just when I thought AMD would actually have a chance in the marketplace vs. Intel they go and do a stupid thing like this.
::Insert Marketing Stuff::"
This is the tactic of a loser. Look where it got Cyrix. What they *should* be doing is emulating Apple, and run a lot of ads expostulating on the "Myth of the Megahertz". This has the double bonus of getting them airtime and also slamming Intel without mentioning Intel outright (or even *with* mentioning Intel, that's fine). They don't even need to get into technical details, just say stuff like "In the most demanding benchmarks, our processors come out ahead. They are more efficient, and better able to perform the tasks that will launch you into the Internet Era.. etc. etc.
If they want to be seen as a serious competetor in the business arena, this is NOT the tactic to take. Bogus "power ratings" are just that. Bogus. I had just started to genuinely *like* AMD as a company that put out a good, solid product with a minimum of BS. Man, I'm so pissed off about this. Grrr!!
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
This wouldn't even be an issue if consumers in general weren't so brand-happy. If they did a little research, they would find that a lower clocked Athlon is just as fast, and half the price of a P4. Unfortunately, that Intel Inside logo carries alot of weight with your average buyer. Thankfully for AMD, however, the fastest growing market segments in PC Sales have consistently been less expensive (sub $1000) machines, not top-of the line 2ghz monsters with RDRAM. In that arena, AMD has a clear Price/Performance advantage
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
yeah, this is a dirty tactic to confuse people, but dont blame AMD. Intel was doing it a while ago, with RDRAM. you got your PC800 rdram...that misteriously ran at 400mhz....how is that pc800?
anyways...it seems to be a common tactic in the industry, it just makes headlines because AMD doesnt have the "WHAT WE DO IS RIGHT BECAUSE WE ARE INTEL" advantage.
Welcome to my land of make believe.
proof that even the underdog can pull dirty marketing tricks
Dirty Marketing tricks?!? Do you think the clock speed of a cpu is an accurate portrayal of the processors power? I think the dirty marketing trick is to tell people what the clock speed is at all! All it does is miss-lead the ignorant consumer (and sometimes even those who should know better).
This certainly raises an eyebrow, but I cannot see how it provides any value to me (or the average consumer). It makes things even more mysterious! Given a choice between something that is well known, with a published clock rate, or a 'second tier brand' that hides information, I'd think it would give Intel and even BIGGER advantage. Unless, of course, for some stupid reason, Intel decides to do the same thing.
But really, for the AMD fan, this is an insult. Hopefully their marketing and PR people know some sort of angle to this beyond the obvious that will magically capture market share by removing its Mhz rating.
the reminds me of the old cyrix chips...
a chip with model number 200 was actually only a 150Mhz chip.
this doesn't bother me too much with AMD doing it tho, their processors tend to have more bang for the Mhz anyway unlike those old cyrix things.
Silly slashdot, sigs are for kids!
When Zip Data, constaintly says things like this about the Atholon "An inexpensive solution that can sometimes match the performance of higher priced PIIIs and P4s." When they should be making statements like "The Atholon beats the crap out of more expensive PIII and P4s in all but a few specialy tweeked game aplications, where the P4 edged ahead".
"Check it out: the new Athlon 1600!"
"Excuse me? Yes, how fast does this processor actually run?"
"It's a 1600!"
"Yes, I know that, but how fast is it? in megahertz?"
"It's equivalent to a Pentium at 1600 Mz."
"Okay, but how fast does it run?"
"I don't understand the question, sir."
"How many megahertz does this processor run at?"
"Perhaps you're not familiar with what we call 'The Megahertz Myth'...."
"I'm thoroughly familiar with it, I've worked in hardware for fifteen years. I just want to know how many megahertz this particular processor runs at."
"It's equivalent to a...."
"No, I don't care about that. What's the clock speed?"
"It's faster than a...."
"That's nice. What's. The. Clock. Speed?"
"Would you like to see some comparisons to...."
"Never mind, I'll just go check out the Motorola booth."
Straight and non jews who run wholesome MS software?
NOOOO! Don't do it AMD :(((
I'm just waiting for them to market their parts by some generic part number. Say like how Sun tracks their part numbers... Take a 501-5838 for example...that's an 400MHz UltraSPARC II processor with 8 megs of cache.
It will be about as funny as people comparing their letters and numbers of their cars with each other. My I300 is better than your 328i. Whatever...
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
... to send you to oblivion.
Well at least Microsoft are honest. You definitely do need a 2000MHz CPU to get tolerable performance out of NT5.
-- SIGFPE
lets say someone not into mhz sees this and reads it as mhz, they will go for it because it sounds higher. this is how to lure away costumers from intel part 2. part 1 was when they decided to change the name to athlon 4 or whatever that was about some time ago.
:)
GG AMD
----
"I believe in karma. That means I can do bad things to people and assume they deserve it" - Dogbert
If AMD thinks that the BIOS won't be revealing the true speeds of the CPUs, they are on crack. I guarantee you that right after these CPUs hit the market, ABIT will release a BIOS update for all of their mobos supporting the chip. This update will show the true CPU speed, giving ABIT an edge in the overclocking market. To compete, ASUS will do the same with their BIOSs/motherboards, which have a hard time against the cheaper ABIT mobos. After that, EPoX will do it for the value oriented segment of the market.
And then it will end up a standard feature on all the AMD mobos out there....
Name the chips according to it's MIPS performance
ie; ATHLON 3000
eh?
This is clearly intented to confuse people. Naming a 1.4Ghz with the number 1600 is clearly false representation. If they go on with this idea I will simply stop recommending AMD to all family and friends. Can't believe there's so many idiots running companies.
Now AMD has resorted to remarking their own chips. Imagine the confusion with the gray market overclockers.
that I got my 1.4 Athon when I did...
For anybody who thinks AMD should try to disprove the Megahertz Myth, see this site: http://www.apple.com/g4/myth/ . Yes, it is at Apple. Yes, this is the same Apple that has been trying to get people to understand that megahertz isn't everything since 1999 (or whatever year they got stuck at 500mhz). Clearly, it hasn't worked for Apple.
While Slashdotters seem quick to point out that performance ratings didn't work for Cyrix, remember that Cyrix used them since the beginning. AMD has become an established competitor to Intel without using performance ratings, so when consumers see the AMD brand combined with a 1600/1.6 or 2000/2.0 number, they'll say, "This is a bigger number than the Intel chip, I'll get this."
If Intel tries to prove that AMD's numbers are fake, AMD has just as many arguments showing how Intel, by having a 20 stage pipeline, greatly inflated their MHz too. The only processor not guilty of inflating the MHz this way, in fact, is the G4 (even the G4e inflates it a bit, with a 7 stage pipeline, though this is arguably acceptable). Therefore, if you don't want to buy a MHz-inflated system, get a Mac.
I'm surprised that anyone really cares about the speed of a CPU. It's not really that immportant. Isn't the problem mostly getting work done? Actually, I's praise AMD, if I thought that wasn't a blatant marketing move.
I've always thought that even software developers, knowing that they had 1GHz of throughput to work with would purposefully bloat their code.
Maybe its time to abstract out processor speed in favor of other things. Maybe looking at FEATURES, and not speed?
I think they should apply colorful racing stripes and different types of aerodymic spoilers and wings to show their true processing speed.
I think that getting rid of the Mhz is an iffy decision at this stage of the marketing war on "The Megahertz Myth", especially getting rid of it in the BIOS. That is just giving everyone less information. But if they are going to do this, I think they should at least give the consumer some kind of, at least slightly, meaningful number. While I know gigaflops still does not tell the whole story at least it would help give the consumer some kind of idea on the performance they would see.
The normal user sees clock speed as a measure of performance. Clearly it isn't, and so AMD is moving to model numbers that use higher numbers. Tom says a A1600 is "as fast" as a P4 1.6ghz, however this still relys on clock speed as a measurement!
They need to move away from clock speed and to real world output. I think a good idea would be do name their CPUs after something like the number of FLOPS or MIPS the processor is capable of, much like Apple has done (except that AMD and Intel are both x86 for the sake of this argument, and so it might actually have an effect), unfortunately, neither Apple nor AMD has the market share or reputation to start a new trend, especially since the Intel PR machine has the "clock speed" crown and is likely in no hurry to reveal how weak a P4 has to be in order to reach the higher clock speeds.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I dunno about dirty marketing tricks, But some dirty schoolgirl panties would sure hit the spot.
Consider what I look at when I shop for most consumer goods. When I buy a car I compare fuel miles per gallon and acceleration, when I buy an appliance I compare their efficiency ratings, etc. Most numbers advertized have a direct bearing on the performance of the product.
Compare the situation when I go to buy a computer. I see a 1.5 GHz Pentium III, a 1.1 GHz Athlon, and a 700 MHz Power PC. Which one is better? The Pentium, right? Wrong? Damned if I know. I do know which one the average consumer will think is the best.
By removing these misleading numbers, I think that AMD may be able to focus attention towards more important benchmarks. I think this is a good thing, and I hope that it doesn't blow up in their face.
This is a good thing. In my perspective, this may be a trailblazing effort for consumers to not purchase CPUs based on their MHz rating. Apple Macintosh G? processors will definitely benefit if they follow AMD's lead. That is one of the reasons why Apple doesn't have a market for ignorant consumers. Everybody knows the bigger the number, the better it is; not with some devices, which account for most of Apple's. Consumers must get smarter in purchasing a computer system. They should have access to performance benchmarks of each CPU, not just be told that XXX CPU is XXX MHz faster than this "Other" CPU. It is like someone comparing a Ford F350 Diesel with John Carmack's Lambourghini in a race to tow a 4,500 lb. trailered boat. AMD was doing just that for years on end with their K6-2 processors. They claimed that an equivalently MHz-rated K6-2 CPU would always be 100MHz to 200MHz faster than an equivalently rated Pentium. What they didn't tell everyone was their CPU's FPU was trash compared to the equivalent Pentium's FPU.
I think this is a way for AMD to burry some of its earlier marketing methods of comparing itself with Intel's CPUs and finaly hoisting their fame with courage by not having to compare themselves with Intel anymore. AMD has been the "Bargain-barrel" CPU for most of its lifetime until the past 1.5 years.
All I can say is faster is not generaly better. Both Intel and AMD have been claiming their CPUs are lower-power than eachothers and even so, they take advantage of the lower power transistors and use more. It's a wash because the CPUs consume more power than their predecessors. We need a good, low-power CPU. Applications don't take advantage of the processing power that today's CPUs have to offer. When will we see true low-power computers? When AMD and Intel stop competing over RAW power, we will see more useful, portable computers.
without prejudice
Remember the P120+? It was a 100 MHz chip.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
...and sell them under the name PowerHouse 2200's.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
This a HIGHLY intelligent move by AMD. Think about it. Intel made their next-generation CPU SLOWER mhz for mhz than their PIII series. Why? So that they can boast higher mhz speeds, since the common misconception among consumers is that more mhz = = more speed! Geeks know this to be untrue, but John and Jane computer buyer don't... thus they buy the P4 2ghz since it has to be better than the other processors... there's more Ps and a higher number next to ghz!!
AMD is calling Intel's bluff, and making the mhz rating a thing of the past. They're forcing consumers to base their decisions on the CPU that is truly faster rather than staring at FUD from marketing people. Face it... clock for clock, AMD is faster than Intel - not to mention MUCH cheaper. Now they have to try to tell John and Jane consumer this... and get them to forget the mhz fallicy.
This is a BRILLIANT move by AMD, and in my mind is the first step in getting rid of the notion that more MHZ = = more speed. I think that this is better not only for the company, but for the legions of computer-buying morons as well. Now they'll have to take a closer look to their computer purchases to find out which is truly better... instead of using an old wives tail to make the decision for them.
You go, AMD.
Believe me - there's no easy way to distribute a clock with sufficient skew and insertion delay control and at a high enough speed to be able to do that across an entire processor die. Even if you take advantage of useful skew, where you are switching flops further down the clock chain to be negative-edge triggered instead of positive-edge, you are still not truly clocking on both clock edges. You ever try to design a double-pumped interface? It's not pretty and it's not trivial. You gain raw clock speed by pipelining - reducing the number of stages of combinational logic between stages of flops, as delay is governed by:
:)
fmax=1/(Tclock-to-q + SUM(Tinterconnect) + SUM (Tcomblogic) + Tflop-setup)
No current methodology would allow either for the design or verification of a full-chip that is double-pumped on the scale of a P4. Therefore, I highly question your conclusion. Sorry...
...that was already made (several times).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's about time we compared different chip architectures on their actual performance instead of an apples and oranges comparison of clock speed. When it comes to advertising I am one of the most critical people you are likely to meet but I think this will help other potentially better cpu architectures gain a foothold. We should be rating cpu speeds in terms of real things we actually do, not clockspeed.
I hope it will result in drastically droping Athlons price again. After that they may identify all next versions as "Sweet Kitty" or "Superstitious Postman" or whatever, it may be even better solution instead of confusing consumers by model numbers. I don't care, just drop prices!
What I find amusing is that the same people who bitch that we shouldn't judge a processor by its clock speed are the same people who bitch that Intel's processors are slower at a certain clock speed than AMDs.
Who cares? The big question is overall performance. Intel made an architectural choice for the future, not for short-term performance gains. The trade-offs that they have made now are going to allow them to grow to much higher clock speeds in the future while AMD has a harder and harder time of it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This is not a dirty marketing trick. This is a (admittedly, stupid) counter to Intel's dirty marketing of their bloated speed ratings.
Here is an article on ZDnet discussing the issue. In it, an independent analyst notes that the P4 is 20% less efficient (does 20% less work per clock cycle) than the the P3. This means that MHz comparisons are no longer comparing apples to apples, and therefore meaningless.
As others have said, this obfuscation won't serve AMD in the long run, but they are the "victim" of this marketing war, not the perpetrator. The true victim is Joe consumer, who buys a chip because it has higher MHz, instead of having a metric which actually measures computing power.
Cyrix did the same thing a number of years back.
As a matter of fact, a quick search shows that they got in hot water for this tactic as this Register Article shows.
Yeah: Just as Hitler hid himself in a bunker and shot himself in the head, we wait to see your dumb ass do the same.
This was truly a Nazi post
Heh.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This makes complete sense and I was wondering when it was going to happen. I would suspect that we will see Intel doing the same.
/. knows which processors to buy, and we don't just pick our processors based on a marketing name. We all look at benchmarks etc and do our comparisons there. The average joe doesn't get it anyway, no mater what the hell the write on the box.
.02.
If you look at the Intel road map, specifically, to the next generation chipset, the IA64, you will see that it is slated to come out at something like 800mhz. No general consumer is going to pay a premium for a 800mhz chip, even though a IA64 at 800mhz will knock the socks off a P4-2ghz.
The consumer has been trained that MHZ are THE measuring stick of processors. As a rule of thumb on like processors that works. IA64 changes all of that, and marketing has to change as well.
I don't know what everyone here is getting all worked up over. Anyone (just about anyone) who reads
That is my
akeRoo
I prefer AMD at this point in the game. But I do think it's interesting to see AMD taking this kind of "strategy". If you remember back just 18 months ago, AMD had no problem proudly boasting and displaying their true CPU speed when they released the first 1GHz CPU.
"My cock is bigger than yours."
Did you friend with the EE degree ever think to check the clock input going into the chip? Seems to me the world would be astounded to find out that their 1GHz pentium has a 500MHz clock.
They'll be so excited to release the 2GHZ, which of course they'll label PR2400 or something of that nature.
And when they make a 1.7ghz or something similar, are they going to say they've hit 2GHZ just because it's similar in speed to a 2GHZ intel?
Who cares, Itanium is the end of them all.
I'm sorry.. when the P4 2ghz can't outperform an Athlon 1.3ghz, I don't think that AMD is doing the dirty marketing.
Rating computer systems (specifically) and chips (more generally) by mhz is absurd. There is more to computer speed than mhz, as we've seen by the various cache and bus differences between the chips available (even using the same manufacturer). A 450mhz P2 will frequently outperform a 500mhz Celeron. When you make the jump to the P3, the change actually widens the gap.
AMD moving away from the mhz game is an excellent move, but they really need to come up with some way of letting the public have some idea of how fast their chips are compared to the competition..
Sancho
If you don't like MHz comparisons, why just make up new numbers to compare to MHz ratings? Why not start marketing on a whole new metric, like MIPS or MFLOPS?
If AMD were to start selling processors based on MFLOPS I suspect Intel would have to publish their own numbers. It would be obvious to consumers that the two ratings were not comparable - that is, if you see an ad with a "1200 MHz" machine and a "35 MFLOPS" machine you don't assume the former is 35 times faster.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
I am a die hard AMD guy. However, if they start with this, the Athlon in my computer now will be the last AMD chip I ever purchase.
Don't they remember Cyrix?
How you see the world is how the world sees you.
Excellent summary - exactly the way I feel. I was never pulled in by mhz alone anyway...
creation science book
if amd is just getting scared about the preformance reviews that are gettting posted? like the one at [H]ard|OCP which shows that AMD is keeping up, but still be out done by the pentium. I know, I know "but the pentium is 600mhz faster than the amd in the tests"; by the time amd gets their 2.2ghz chip out there to compete with the intel 2ghz, intel will have a faster one out there for people to test. after all intel is starting to take the lead in the chip speeds.
A no smokeing section in a restaurant is like having a no peeing section in a swimming pool.
Accordingly, the first chip released under this new nomenclature will be the 1600 MHz "Athlon 2.1GHz." AMD expects sales to improve immediately.
...why not just use SPECfp/SPECint or some other established performance-rating criteria?
Well, there will no longer be anything called "overclocking" for AMD chips. Meanwhile, the rest of us will just have to rely on Tom and Anand to provide us with benchmark data. Heatsink and fan manufacturers are going to love this. Time to buy some heat sink and fan stocks. However fast it goes is how fast it goes. Maybe we'll have to start measuring things in MIPS instead of MHZ. Of course real world benchmarks are the best. Pretty funny. It will be interesting to see what Chipzilla is going to do. Don't forget that CPUID will still report the clock freq and so will the OS. Maybe AMD could eventually convince Microsoft to not display the number in a future revision of XP, but that won't work with Linux. Also don't forget that Intel is going to be in the opposite position with their Itanium. They will only be too happy to see "model" ratings at that point.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Specifically, let's use their Investor Relations e-mail address since anyone who owns an AMD processor is, technically, an investor :-)
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
...think like your average consumer. Since if they know ANYTHING about their computers, its the speed, imagine them trying to buy software.
/.'ers here, I'm sure we all have tech-impaired family and friends (like that one who bought Max Payne to run on their 486...you know who they are).
"Okay sir, and how fast is your computer?"
"Its an AMD 1600"
"So...how fast is it?"
"Its an AMD 1600"
"Do you know how fast it is, in MHz?"
".......Its an AMD 1600"
The average consumer will now know even less. And while that might not mean much to the
Sure, it might be what AMD needs to compete with Intel's ads, but they should just launch their own ad campaign showing how the 1.4GHz Athalon performs just as well, or better than the new 2GHz Pentium IV in almost every non-SSE-related benchmark.
ok, in truth i see what it matters .. a consumer could easily buy a slower AMD with a higher model number, than the actual speed of an intel. i can see that. and i suppose this is where it becomes the duty of the manufacturer to not just start making models numbered things like "PC-5billion-X".
even so, lots of manufacturers have been making slightly misleading product names fFor years (centuries) .. you know, like "ultra absorbent paper towels", which in fFact are the same dumb chunks of dead tree in "quite nice paper towels". it's just a silly product name.
so kudos to AMD's marketing department fFor coming up with a way to make their machines amore ppealing.
everyday. All the geeks on
Well, you got what you asked for. Now go figure out the speed of your new Athlon machine.
...the "Lameness Filter" doesn't let me put more than 3 dots (...) in a row in my subject line, but it lets ASCII non-art through. Bizarre...
-Vic
You can't win this this sort of strategy either. Say they name their next Athlon the "Athlon 2500". Ooooh! Big number, MUST be fast and the spec numbers beat a P4 2gig. Intel simply releases their next chip as the P4-3500 against the next Athlon 3000, with absolutely no connection to the clockrate (which is, say, 2.5 gig).
People see the 3000 number vs the 3500 number. The 3500 MUST be better and faster than the 3000. Buy the P4 -3500 instead of the Athlon-3000. Again, the numbers screw you over.
People see Mandrake 8.0 vs RedHat 7.0 or 7.1 and think that Mandrake MUST be well ahead of RedHat when, in fact, they are roughly equivalent. Would Joe Blow prefer to buy SuSE 6.5 or Mandrake 8.1? Hmmm...8.1 of course, its almost 2 more than SuSE! It's more updated by 2!
Garbage, of course.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Do they actually show you a figure for your salary? Or do you get paid "Salary 1600"?
It is my understanding that if you put high-octane fuel in a car that doesn't require it the fuel won't burn as completely. This leads to extra pollution and poorer performance. Thus, high-octane fuel can be "worse" in some circumstances.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I also did some scientific research. I wrote a similar program, and printed it out from both a 1 GHz Pentium III and a 500 Mhz G4. I then threw both copies of the printed program out a window. I was surprised to find that they landed at approximately the same time. This just goes to show that Intel is obviously counting its clocks TWICE instead of ONCE. I think this is backed up even further by the fact that the copy of the program printed out from the Pentium machine, fluttered as it fell a lot more than the G4 copy.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Lets face it, BMW, Volvo, Cadillac, etc. don't sell on speed. Instead they sell on brand and *reorganization* in the market. So "hiding" the MHz won't be a factor for AMD. AMD must work on *branding* its name for consumers.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Its creepy that Intel seems like the honest platform now. A P4 2000 is actualy 2GHz. PC800 RDRAM is actually 800Mhz. But calling an Athlon 1.4 an Athlon 1600 is almost as bad as calling 266 DDR SDRAM PC2100!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They have over 900 horse power! Holy Crow!
This whole thing sorta reminds me of the Spinal Tap guitar amp that goes to 11.
I think I am going to call my TI 99 4/a in storage to a "TI 4000" and then sell it on Ebay.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
Why don't they show the measurment in MIPs, or BogoMIPs?
Those are always faster than the MHz rating anyways.
OK, but if I can't compare the clock speed of an Athlon vs. a P4, I also can't compare two different Athlons. How do I know whether I should be model 1600 or model 1800? It would sound like saying Windows 2000 is better than Windows 98 because the number is higher. Not telling how to compare two of your products, will likely decrease your sale.
Also, now Intel can say: "Our latest P4 beats the crap out of an Athlon XYZ" and people won't know that they compared it the the slowest model.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
And, you know what? Within a week, we all sigh with relief, because the old units never worked anyway!
When was the last time you heard the MIPS or FLOPS rating for a processor? When the RISC processors came out, and scored 100 x the nearest CISC chip, we suddenly started hearing how worthless those ratings really were. (Which was true, only the people saying it had been using them to crush the competition under their feet, the previous week.)
What's the FLOPS rating for a Pentium IV? Anyone seen it listed on any of Intel's adverts? Curious, that.
Truth is, there -is- no meaningful number you can use, to describe a processor. Applications will vary so much in performance, depending on how well they exploit the various caches and pipelines, that any value you get will be useless for any realistic comparison.
Worse, the bottlenecks for the main memory, the PCI bus, any local busses, etc, ad nausium, are so much more significant than the processor. Sure, building a faster chip will earn lots of green bits of paper, whereas building a better motherboard will simply earn lots of whining from hardware manufacturers.
The reality is, though, that processors today would be perfectly adequate, if the support hardware were up to scratch. (Anyone remember the problems the 486DX-50's caused? Those worked at 50 MHz, direct. Great design, but the hardware needed to run it killed it. The 486DX2-66 was really just a DX-33 with some fancy over-clocking. The support hardware was all standard stuff. That's why it caught on.)
It's time to take another look at that hardware, though. I doubt it's changed much since the DX-33 days, except with a few extra levels of caching. It's still convection-cooled, for the most part. The connectors are still badly designed and cheaply made. Sockets are built to be easy for plebs, not easy on components.
Compare this with a VME or VMX bus, where the backplane alone costs more than most top-end PCs and where ease-of-use can go jump in a lake. These are systems where customers can afford to pay, and don't want to pay for junk.
I'm not saying PC manufacturers should suddenly switch over to VMX-style architecture (128-bit busses can get a little interesting, and besides, I've some PCI cards I'd like to keep using!), but it's time to do some re-designing. If a user wants to be babied, they're not going to handle hardware installation, anyway. They're going to go to a shop. Providing idiot-proof systems is simply driving up the number of idiots and driving down the performance of computers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IBM refers to their own mainframes's performance using an obscure value like 'Relative performance units'. They use an arbitrary baseline from one of their own models - call that 'Relative performance 1.0' and then proceed to not only NEVER publish any other vendors numbers but tell you that any other vendor's machines are not comparable and that no other benchmark can be compared or correlated. In a similar vein if you use some of the Lotus benchmarking tools for Notes and publish the results they can sue you.
For instance, I've decided I want a new AMD, because they are a much more cost effective solution... but which one? I want one with X FSB speed and Y Mhz! I don't want to have to search all over to find comparisons between model Z21000 and RR8000, to find out that RR8000 is really the better chip...
I understand why AMD would do this, but do they believe that THAT is what is holding back further acceptance of AMD chips? Are they not growing fast enough? I don't know... it seems like a bad move to me.
Related, I've been confused by all the memory designations. It was pretty easy when they were just PC100, PC133 whatever... but now with the PC2100 or whatever... I'd hope there is a pattern, but I haven't spent the time to look. Next upgrade, I guess I'll have to. The problem is that from the code name it isn't obvious what the real characteristics are, and to me, that's a problem.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
They should just come up with some better model naming conventions so that the model number isn't mistaken for the clock speed, or keep the speed on the box somewhere (on the back, or whatever).
It is a bit misleading to call a chip the Athlon 1600, but have it clock at 1.4 GHz. I bet people will complain when they get a 1.4 GHz processor when they were expecting 1.6 Ghz.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The last PC I put together was AMD based. Before that, I had always gone Intel. What moved me over was the fact that I could get more performance for my dollar. As long as the processor is powerful enough to do what I want, I don't really care about the clock-speed. Yeah, having a more clock speed can bring "bragging rights", but every day we are shown that clockspeed is almost meaningless in terms of performance.
;)
In my mind, however, hiding the clock-speed rating is equivlant to hiding the version number on software. It's no longer Windows 6.0, it's Windows XP, or 2000, or Windows "The Version that Makes Windows Good(tm)."
This whole processor coverup thing started with Intel and their "Pentium" series. It does make business sense, but it can tick off tech-savvy people. Why? The average consumer thinks "Processor" and not "80586 200MHz CODENAME CPU". Consumer understand brand names, and brand names help companies develp identies and products. That is why it is now Windows 2000 and Windows XP: it creates a sub-brand of the real product.
Think about this: Windows NT 5.0 and Windows NT 6.0 versus Windows 2000 and Windows eXPerience. The version numbers make it sound like a simple "upgrade" while the brand name make them seem like completly seperate products. It may be just enough to convince people that it is a world of change, regardless of what is actually in the box.
Back to processors, I think AMD is going to try to make some brands - focus on the name and image and push aside the gritty technical details. IE. "The AMD WhizBang(tm) processor is as powerful as the Intel Pentium 4 2000MHz." It's marketing... pure and simple.
I don't think it will matter what they call it or how fast the CPU runs. Independant benchmarks will show the true performance of the processors. This could be a good thing in that it may get ordinary consumers to become more informed about speed vs performance. IMHO, an informed consumer is much better than one that simply buys the one with the bigger MHz rating.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Salesmen
Flat out. That's the problem with computers these days is that the salesmen don't know the inside of the computer from the outside.
Example: Back when Intel started making S370 Celerons, I went and asked a computer store clerk if it was Slot1 or S370. He said it was slot1. "All the older socket processors are too out of date and just don't perform as well." After going back home and looking on the internet to find out that the computer was a S370 rather than Slot1, I didn't trust that salesman again.
I figgured I'd try again last week with the Pentium IVs. I found another sales clerk and acted like a potential college student needing a computer for college. I asked him which was the fastest processor. "Oh, hands down, the Pentium IV! I mean, they just released a 1.8GHz chip, when all AMD has is a 1.3 GHz chip." I figured I'd play this out..."But is it worth the money? I mean, that Athlon system is $400 cheaper!" His response? "Well, if you need the cheaper system for college, pick the Athlon. But if you really want those games to shine, pick the Pentium IV. All that money is for the faster processor and faster memory." I just had to get out of there before I blew my top over his faster memory claim with RAMBUS.
Look at it this way: If you're ever gonna go out and buy a car, look over the lots to see what you like and what looks nice. But for crying out loud, NEVER take for granted what the dealers say, because they're out there to sell. If you want to know how the things honestly perform, find someone who already owns one and ask them! Or go to your local mechanic (everyone should have one, just like everyone should have a neighborhood geek whenever they need help with their computer) and ask them what they think about that specific model car.
That's why Cyrix and Intel both have to crank out these pathetic "P" ratings in order to satisfy market competition. The people who sell the products in the stores have no other choice.
When I read this earlier on ZDNet, "industry experts" were saying that AMD couldn't get consumers to abandon MHz ratings for instructions per clock cycle. Personally, I don't see a problem with them trying to change comparison factors as long as the numbers are meaningful, which 1600 doesn't sound like it is.
I'm sure their marketing team could come up with something like 1.9 giga-doodles for a 1.4 MHz cpu. Obviously something a little more sexy would be needed though.
If AMD changed schemes, then what geek here would not buy them because of it? We know what they're referring to. But I guess the average consumer couldn't compare giga-doodles to GHz on their own. But AMDs marketing could again jump in with stickers & posters for retail stores and OEMs. Something that specifically states what the giga-doodles of this AMD is vs. the giga-doodles of similarly priced P4. That's definitely not illegal and would be better received by the geeky population at least.
This is just an idea rolling around in my head so bear with me a sec:
:-)
AMD sees that consumers "aren't able to discern the actual significance of MHz" and therefore aren't grasping the power/price value that their chips have. Rather than try to explain 'the MHz Myth' they decide to inflate the AMD chip's MHz to that of a comparable Intel model and then use that as the model number.
Intel simply has to label their models as 'Intel(r) True 1.7GHz' as opposed to 'other manufacturers who won't tell you what you're buying'. Now AMD appears to be hosing all these consumers who don't know about Mhz but know that they're pissed when someone sells them 1 lb of sugar in a 2 lb bag.
How do you suppose AMD plans to counter this obvious(?) tactic by Intel? They must've already dismissed the idea of explaining the relevance of MHz - because they aren't even trying to publicise it to the public at large (that I've seen)
So, is this an actual Achilles Heel or have I had too much coffe and my brains overheated? There are surely flaws in this idea, so feel free to point them out
-Kevin
--
There's nothing like a girl with a plunging neckline to keep a man on his toes.
The worst thing for AMD would be for Intel to start spinning it as:
"They can't keep up, so they HAVE to change the numbering. We're actually leading the way."
as opposed to AMD's take of:
"We want you to know that our chip X is comprable to intel chip Y."
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
The performance is not the thing you feel most, I'll tell you what you feel most with higher octane levels: much less fuel consumption! At least in my car, a fill with 98oct lasts about 100km longer than one with 95oct. Note that in the manual of my car it says "98oct recommended, but 95 allowed".
Now, one may argue that 100km is not a lot, but same volume of fuel for more kilometers is probably also better for the environment.
You know what, Stuart, I like you, you're not like the other people here in the industry.
Oh, don't get me wrong here, they're fine people, they're good office workers.. But they're content to sit back, maybe play a little solitaire, maybe kick back a cool Coors 16 ouncer.. They're good fine people, Stuart, but they don't know what the hell AMD is smoking.
You know that Linus Torvalds guy, the guy who coded that kernel? Some of the neighbors say he drinks crappy American beer, but, I don't believe it. Well, for his birthday, all he wanted was a 1.4ghz Athlon. He said, "Man, get me a 1.4ghz Athlon. I'll never ask for another processor for a few months." So he breaks down and buys an Athlon.
Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I drop by Linus' place. I see him ripping his computer apart. I said, "What're you looking for?" He says, "I'm looking for my hz rating." I say, "Jumpin ESR on a pogo stick! Everybody knows the hz rating is displayed on the bios, on the boot. Why the hell do you think it wouldn't be?" Now Stuart, do you think a guy like Linus is going to know, what the hell AMD is smoking?
I first became aware of it this morning, the summer my oldest boy, CmdrTaco posted on Slashdot. You know that carnivore that goes through your e-mail every year? Well this time, it came with this program called the Mixer. The feds said, keep your buffers from overflowing in the Mixer at all times. But CmdrTaco, he was a daredevil, just like his old man. He was coding while drunk, saying, look at me, look at me, POW HE HAD A KERNEL PANIC! They found his drivers in lost+found! A few days later, I open up the mail, and there's a letter addressed to CmdrTaco, and it's entitled, "Do you know what the hell AMD is smoking?!"
Now Stuart, if you look at the bandwidth graphs around any city with a large population of clueless users.. Redmond, Washington for example. Look at the bandwidth. You can't get a good latency, can't play Quake.. The corporations say it's cause of porn, but I know what's really going on Stuart, I know it's the clueless users, they're in it with AMD, they're building moron boxes for the masses!
I swear to god!
You know what, Stuart, I like you, you're not like other people here in the industry.
athlon @1400 is by most benchmarks (except quake),
about as fast as an P4 @2 GHz, see the HardOCP review.
So AMD aren't really
extending there numbers has far as they could.
I guess AMD are trying to keep the Athlon brand
image by still winning the all benchmarks.
An Athlon-4 1600 will still comfortably beat
the P4-1600 at almost all benchmarks except
quake 3 (Athlon might just win at quake 3 too given an Nforce MB) and SPEC.
Like Tom says AMD have to do this because they
just can't sell to Joe Sixpack based on true
performance only on the single performance rating.
AMD just announced that its revenues will
be down 15% this quarter, which translates to a
big loss. OEMs seem to force Athlon prices to be
slightly lower than a P4, clock for clock. Now
with Intel selling P4s from 1.3 to 1.5 at $133, AMD just can't get much over a 100 bucks for its top CPU, and at those price they just can't make any money.
If AMD do somelike.
Athlon 4 @ 1400GHz = Model 1600
Athlon 4 @ 1533GHz = Model 1750
Athlon 4 @ 1600GHz = Model 1850
Athlon 4 @ 1733GHz = Model 2000
Then assuming they can actually make these chips,
and get OEMs to buy them near P4 prices (Model
number for P4 MHz), they'll be able to make some money next quarter.
What's to stop Intels counter Advertising PR? "Our chips don't lie about their speed."
The fact that they are specifically saying "Don't show anyone what clockspeed their chip REALLY is" is complete and utter bullshit, because that is what really drives this particular processor. Calling it by its model number is really really lame and confusing.
My last 3 Processors have been AMD, I've been recommending them to people to buy over Intel, but I will go away from them if they keep this up.
-- Dan
the MHZ of a processor means absolutely squat.
It's been rehashed time and time again, and silly enough people keep clinging onto the MHZ speed as a performance rating. It means nothing and indicates nothing. everyone with a clue knows this and everyone that ever owned a cyrix 586 or 686 processor really knows this. you'll never get real ratings out there (print the mips and mflops on the chips!!!!) but even then that means nothing with the addition of huge pipelines and multiple pipelines.
I say just market as follows.
Athalon 4.2 - It's 4.2 times faster than the Pentium 4 (or whatever)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Truth is, for most things, the AMD 1.4ghz is faster than a Intel 2.2ghz (overclocked 2ghz). And of course, on everything but windows, everything is faster. Maybe we could come up with processor numbers based more on how well they benchmark? Make sure you test more than just Photoshop, as to not make the Mac users too happy :-)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Can't help but think it would have been better PR to just stop mentioning a number as part of the model designation (kindof like Pentium/586 but for different reasons), rather than quoting one that is pretty obviously intended to be misinterpreted by the dumb consumers who think MHz means something across processor types, and require a line explaining that MHz values aren't particularly helpful in real world performance measurement in the advertising.
They could even get cross-licensing deals going - "Get the new Athlon Calvin Klein Special Edtion". and such like...
Since when was AMD an underdog? They might not have the same market share that Intel has, but come on...
"Oh that poor multinational chip manufacturing
behemoth beating up on that other multinational chip manufacturing behemoth."
I can understand why clock ratings can be left out of the marketing picture, but AMD certainly shouldn't hide clock information from *everybody*. I know that Athlons outperform Pentiums, as do many others in the industry. The only thing this move will do for me is deprive me of a convenient way to estimate the performance of one Athlon against another Athlon.
Why doesn't Apple and AMD team up to promote a new unit based on MIPS (or FOPS, etc.), and normalize it so that it will always be greater than or equal to Intel's Mhz? Problem solved. This is a little more intelligent than their new tactic which is in a sense deceiving the consumer.
When some of us look at a car/truck/suv whatever,
we don't just look at 0 to 60 times, we also look
at quarter mile, RPM, horsepower, torque etc. So
why not make Winmarks/Whetstones (slashstones?)
the main measurement?
Change the very basis of comparisons. Why are
consumers so myopic as to look at MHz ratings but
not MFLOPS or something else?
You won't know you haven't spent enough on defense until you lose a war - Thatcher
Just FYI.
Like you said though, Intel has really left AMD with no choice but to do this, as Joe Consumer relies upon marketing hype, glossy pictures, and pretty colors more often than solid facts.
However,
That's usually a tactic for the underdog or knockoff artist.
IE: The competitor has a better product (or similar but better marketed), so you try to make your product look like the competitors.
Real life example: Company XYZ makes makes some nice cologne and calls it Rouge #1. You also sell cologne that's similar, but doesn't enjoy the same market share. So what are you to do?
Sell your cologne as "just like Rouge #1". And you make sure the competitor's name stands out more than yours, just as I did.
The question I beg to ask is if AMD is willing to be associated with washroom vending machines.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Its probably a good idea to move away from cycles as a measure of performance. I mean, which would you want: A 3Ghz i386 or a 1.6ghz athlon?
Cycles != performace. But it does give a clue and a half as to how a CPU is going to perform against a like CPU.
A 300mhz pIII will likely be roughly 1/2 the speed
of a 600mhz pIII (disregard any bus speeds or other bottle necks).
So uhhh, about how much faster is a Athlon Millinium Edition(tm) compared to Athlon 2000?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Clock speed is an overrated metric in the first place. The clock in a processor is used for one thing: to synchronize the flow of information along the logic gates. There is a lot going on in one of those things, and just because the clock is faster doesn't mean that the processing power is greater.
~ now you know
You have torque and the power to weight ratio.. so its the same thing as MHZ (a standard metric also).
The CPUs should be marketed by how many FPS they get in 640x480 in demo001 or whatever.
On both Intel and AMD's side.
That way we won't have to look up benchmarks if we want to buy something (and all we care about is Q3A, right?)
(Yes, this was a sarcastic post)
scenario:
hey mr. salesman I need a fast computer.
reply: ok we have this one wich is X speed and this one which we dont have a clue to how fast it is. but the one that is X speed is a genuine INTEL and well you cant be too sure what your getting with that other one.
According to the article, the model number will be printed on the chip instead of the clock speed, i.e. "A1600" for the 1600 model. Well, my 800MHz athlon says "A0800" on it, and the 1.2GHz that I recently borrowed from a friend says "A1200" on it. If they print "A1600" on a 1.4GHz chip, that's beyond obnoxious, it's misleading, because they're printing a higher number than the chip's clock rate in a spot that is established as the place where the clock rate goes.
I agree that they need to focus on educating consumers, in terms that consumers understand. For example, the relationship between clock rate and performance is something like the relationship between a tachometer and a speedometer: if the engine doesn't do much work per cycle, you'll go slower even if you crank it faster.
Education will help more than model numbers will; AMD is well-liked because they make a product that's honestly good, and playing tricks with the apparent clock speed will take away one of the qualities that makes them better than Intel. And especially, even if they use model numbers in marketing materials, they shouldn't hide the clock rate in places that most users don't see but can be very important to a technician, like the BIOS.
So, you would define smart as admitting defeat to the competition where you were once ready to pass in the race?
.6 bigger than AMD's number.
Here's the problem: AMD's been whoopin Intel in the benchmarks, so Intel fires back by overrating it's processors. It's so dumb, it works, because consumers are dumb. So, even though Intel's P4 machines cost $400 more to make just to get the same performance, they're attracting customers who take that number and sleep soundly with it at night knowing it's
AMD's own problem is that by doing this, they admit defeat to Intel and say, "Even though we want to get out of your shadow, we're going to play the game by your rules, because you still are the market leader."
Tell me then, what's going to happen when the 64-bit processors start coming out? Is AMD going to I-rate (Itanium-rate) their processors, even though the Itanium is a newly-designed processor that only emulates x86 instructions while the Sledgehammer computates them directly? That's just going to make us even more i-rate (excuse the pun).
AMD has the money and the processor to get themselves out of Intel's shadow. But so far, I have only seen one real commercial that AMD set forth (two years ago) to punch the Athlon hard. It only ran for about a month, and made them look wierd (is technology supposed to be about a gameshow where if you lose, you get hit by a train?). If AMD wants to remain in Intel's shadow, they should go ahead and follow a P-rating system. But if they truly want to become their own company and actually compete, they need drop this charade and start promoting how well their processors do, rather than what they're rated at.
It would show high-level results of independent testing of appropriately chosed AMD and Intel based systems (and not a whole raft full -- just one or two popular sets). With a couple of graphs and summary numbers, the consumer would see that an Athlon 1.4GHz performs comparably to or better than an Intel 1.8GHz, or whatever.
Don't overwhelm them. 1 page of reasonably large text and pictures should suffice.
The harder part (once control has been wrested from the brainless marketers) would be to get the sheet into salespersons, saleswebs, etc. hands for presentation.
Customers, even non-technical ones, are very adroit to smelling BS, and very adverse to it. I think an honest approach might work better than the proposed obfuscation.
Why don't chips compete on power consumption and battery life?
I think we can all agree that the latest and greatest chips are grossly overpowered for the average consumer, even the average gamer.
So in this age of power crises in California, why not sell laptops or desktops that are smaller and consume less power? I personally want a laptop that will run eight to ten hours on a battery.
Right now, I have a ThinkPad 570 that has every feature I want. It has a Pentium II Mobile at 366 Mhz. I can watch DVDs (granted, I have a hardware decoder PCMCIA card), browse the web, check email, even play games (Fallout Tactics) and I have no complaints at all. Battery life is two to three hours, depending on what I'm doing.
Meanwhile, Intel and AMD are releasing gigahertz processors for laptops. Why? Laptops are not gaming machines. Laptops are for a portable office. Most usage is email, word processing and internet access. By designing what is now a Pentium III 1.13 Ghz to instead be 500 Mhz, you could save money and power (while still making use of the SpeedStep features to further reduce clock cycles while on battery).
Truly "on the go" laptops could be smaller and lighter with longer run times. High end "desktop replacement" laptops could still use the full speed processors and the powerhouse video cards which spank my Voodoo 3.
Desktops could likewise be smaller, using the same features. Most desktops are available with build-in everything, so expansion bays/slots could be kept to a minimum.
Another advantage of this is that one could create silent computers, similar to the Apple G4 Cube. Less heat generation means less fans and that means silence.
Those who want to overclock are going to buy the high end processors anyways. But those building an MP3 server/player to integrate with their TV/stereo are not going to need a 2 Ghz processor. A 500 Mhz Pentium III (0.13 micron process) would simply need a heatsink and some airflow.
I welcome the day when megahertz is something you need to look to the "technical specs" page (and I mean technical).
I completely agree. most of the programming I personally deals with large (100+ GB) text files. The slow-down is in the disk access these days, not the processor. I know this commment is specific to what i am doing, but just thought id throw in my 2 cents :-)
Here's an article relating to your post.
I remember Cyrix alredy tried this trick. I had 6x86 166+ which was just 133MHz CPU. Cyrix failed... why could AMD succeed?
You can say AMD CPUs are great, and Cyrix wasn't. But I disagree - my Cyrix was stable for years.
This makes things a bit more difficult to track up front before I purchase a CPU, but eventually the hardware review sites will publish the metrics that people ask for.
;-)
Me, I'll probably look for an approximation of how many KKeys/sec I can handle for the distributed.net project with a given processor, assuming 99.9% load devoted to the effort.
After all, that's what MOST of my CPU cycles seem to be going towards.
This whole discussion boils down to 2 points:
1) Hiding the Mhz from the masses is good
2) Misleading people about clock speed is bad
So why name a 1400Mhz PC as a 1600? That sounds like "lying" about the clock speed. Instead, name it an Athlon 6000? Name the 1500Mhz part Athlon 6500. That way, no one will make the "Mhz equivalency" mistake that hurt Cyrix, but the frequency is still hidden.
Who here bought an HP 600 or a Canon 720? No one, because manufacturers never made the mistake of naming printers by DPI. But I bet some people have an HP 624C.
The best solution would be a standards body, started by a tech reviewer, (like Tom's hardware or Anandtech) to assign each chip maybe 3 numbers that indicate it's performance in 3 key areas. Perhaps applications, games, and server. Then the consumer can easily browse the shelves looking at whichever number best applies to them. If the rating is independant, then we don't care if it is proportional to the Mhz or what, it is a valid usable measure for the consumer. Isn't that what we want?
Out of curiosity, why hide it so completely? This is an intelligent marketing move whether or not one agrees with it, but for those who need to know--i.e. the enthusiast crowd that AMD has in the palm of their hand--couldn't they just have it displayed in the BIOS? The average SOHO user certainly won't be poking around there. The average overclocker, on the other hand, will want to know where he/she's at.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
They could try and do a marketing ploy like that, but unfortunately since Apple has an image problem with most people they usually just slap an "Apple's are slow" label on them and proceed to the more "acceptable" processors...
I almost find it amusing that after years of jumping up and down and waving their hands that "mhz doesn't matter" (pardon the cliche) most articles talking about this new non-mhz marketing concept fail to mention apple at all...
I just assumed that "Athlon 1600" meant 1.6 Ghz. I like AMD's idea of ditching clock speed since it's irrelevant. I don't agree with a model number that closely resembles a clock speed. There are morons who work at Best Buy and other computer chains that are going to tell consumers that the machine is 1.6 Ghz. Why? Because it just makes sense and they don't know any better than the consumer. Then Best Buy will get sued for false advertising when someone figures it out. I would personally like to see model numbers like "A0108" (Athlon released Aug 2001). Any guess that it represents a 1.4 Ghz chip? Not really.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
..is the way one doctor on one hardware site with no real references can tell the world that AMD is going with this new plan... and the entire internet eats it up. The internet offers a wealth of information and misinformation as well (and porn of course!) so reserve judgement until these processors hit the street.
There's one real down side to this. From what I've read, the scalability of the P4 has problems when it comes to ghz. It'll be plenty fast, but at a lower clock speed (or was that the Itanium?)
Anyhow, if AMD convinces them NOW that mHz doesn't matter, it could blow up on them in a few years when AMD speed outruns that of Intel.
We should wait couple years till Intel will use the same approach because they will reach Da Limit. Whatever it will be -- speed of light, too freaking hot, some ABCDEF rules about emmision, MPAA, DMCA -- I dont know. They will just have to do the same. The thing is that consumer still want to have SIMPLE specification. So, they probably will ends up measuring in Pentiums IV or something understandable.
Oh, and most of hardware sites will try to get real Hz anyway...
I buy AMD processors because I do not like Intel, as a company. If AMD is going to start these types of tricks, which make it harder for me to determine what clock speed my processor is running at (this is important to me, in case you don't understand) then I might as well buy the cheapest part for the performance rating. If Intel lowers their prices enough I'll switch back since AMD doesn't appear to be very loyal to their current customers.
I mean what are they going to do next? Include unique IDs for their chips or lock the speed of the processor so I can't overclock them? Oh wait...
Its true the clock speed of the processor doesn't matter in real world benchmarks. But honestly, most americans don't even know what the clock speed means. They probably would never use the power of these processors. And most likely they'll buy a system because of its price, not the clock speed. But the clock speed of the processor is important to me because I need to know if it is running optimally. I'm not real upset about the multiplier locking or difficulty in overclocking, since technology doubles every 8-12 months and processors are much cheaper than they used to be. But please don't take away the information I find useful. Don't make me find an alternative. I'm your customer. Are you listenning? Hello?
Let's see numbers that really can be compared across different platforms, such as:
How many minutes to compile these particular 100,000 lines of C++ code?
How many gigaflops?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Is an Athlon 1600 faster than two Atari 800s?
Or is it slower than my Amiga 4000?
The pcd designation for DDR memory is the amount bandwith it has. This was to compair it to Rambus. The DIMM Standard of PC133 is its MHZ. PC2100 runs at 133 Mhz (DDR to 266). While PC133 runs at 133 Mhz, but has less bandwith.
Q. Will you buy a chip that hides its Mhz rating?
A. Even as a current AMD Athlon owner, I wouldn't. Not even close. This has got to be the stupidist idea ever.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Why not bill chip performance in terms of flops?
Give a minimum flop rating and a maximum flop rating... seems simple enough.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Hammer will knock it out. AMD is planning on actually getting 64bit processors to desktops, instead of just that machine in the back of the server room. Btw, $3400 is too much to pay for a junky 700mhz that can't even stand up to a Athlon 4.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I remember very clearly that a good number of people were angry with Cyrix when they found out that their 5x86 200 wasn't running at 200 MHz -- rather it only scored the same as a Pentium 200 in some benchmark. I'd think a company like AMD would remember that, but it looks like the old "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it" adage is correct.
I still love AMD's product, but this new marketing is a shame, imo.
Didnt Cyrix try this, when they where losing against Intel?
/me frowns
We all know what happend to Cyrix (was a nice snack for VIA...). Pity if AMD would make the same mistake. They shouldn't let Intel get them so stressed about those 2Ghz...
This sig is intentionally left blank
The only way to make it all true and fair would be for the manufacturers to start marking the chips with a number that more accurately identifies the actual capabilities of the chip.
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison
One word: Cyrix
when dealing with mental midgets, never underestimate the value of a sports analogy:
of course, if they're REALLY stupid, they won't understand that one because it doesn't bring in the NFL. so for extreme morons you may have to use the following:
'nuff said.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
-me
AMD should start a marketing wave telling people how other chip manufacturers might have higher Mhz, but have crap performance. And make sure all their OEM's are TRAINED and oriented on the CPU architecture. I can walk into any computer store and make a salesperson look like a complete bafoon. I mean, its totally their fault for this situation that chip manufacturers are in.
AMD should send under cover consumers around to their largest OEM's and check out how they are selling their chips. Imagine their faces when they realize that, even though their product is superior to Intel crap, the salesmen are making consumers swallow dog shit by the gallon.
If I had a penny for every retarded salesman I met............... my name would be Bill Gates. And dont get me started about him...
You know. Verified information. He doesn't mention it. He just says its so. Are you all so stupid that you believe Tom's word without questioning? Its not like the idiot hasn't been wrong before. (The P4 is just an overclocked P3! Call out the troops! .. oh wait, I was wrong. Oopsie)
So Tom, who told you this? Surely you can *verify* your information, right?
Complete, utter, 100% moron.
I'm surprised not to have seen any post mentioning this modded up to my threshold. AMD has already used a non MHz identification in the past, with the K5 series of microprocessors.
Here is a Press Release for the K5-PR100.
With the release of the K6 series, and AMD's initial clock speed lead over Intel, they seemed to have dropped the PR designation.
I support AMD and their products, but seriously people, don't try to paint this as anything other than a marketing ploy to sell more CPUs.
As soon as they have the lead again, AMD will most likely return to advertising clockspeed. Such is the way of the world.
I'm sure AMD will release the clock speeds in the technical documentation. They have nothing to hide from the people who are aware clock speed isn't the only factor that determines how fast a processor can crunch numbers. And if they don't, they'll lose the power-users who currently flock to AMD in droves, which would bring them back to where they started.
Actually, horsepower explains things quite nicely. Your bike with 90 horsepower is faster than any car due to its improved power-to-weight ratio. Say a zippy car is 2200 pounds with driver, and puts out 200 hp. Each hp is dragging 11 lbs. around. You on your bike weigh maybe 540 lbs, so each of your 90 hp has only 6 lbs. to move (half as much).
(unless your bike is a harley, in which case the two of you weigh something like 900 lbs...)
There will be some resistance against this, but let me tell you why the resistance is really there: People were not turned off from the "PR" ratings (hmmm, that's a redundant way of saying it, isn't it? "Performance Rating ratings"??) because they were there or because they failed. People were turned off from them because they did not represent actual performance. A "PR400" Cyrix chip did not run as fast as a 400MHz Pentium II. Heck, it didn't even run as fast as a 400MHz Celeron! In order to find the performance of that particular Cyrix chip, you had to take a 400MHz K6-2 and downclock the chipset from 100MHz to 66MHz (even though the Cyrix chip was running at 100MHz chipset setting). Then, the Cyrix chip only matched the K6-2-400 as a *best case scenario*. In most other benchmarks, said chip did not even outperform equally clocked K6 chips, and in certain nontrivial circumstances, the Cyrix chip performed like much lower frequency processors Frankly, it was insulting to the masses, but it was insulting not because it was a performance rating, but because it was abused.
Currently, systems are sold on equally misleading ratings called "clock frequency". "Clock frequency" is not quite as bad as the abuse that Cyrix gave to their performance ratings, but it is pretty misleading. I'm surprised that system vendors have not been taken to task for customer abuse relating to implication that frequency is an accurate determinant of processor performance between microarchitectures (especially where the Celeron and VIA C3 is involved!). So, you see, I view the Athlon model numbering scheme as being more honest to the consumer than the overly abused megahertz rating.
With so many AMD Customers overclocking, can they even legally do this, since someone could VERY EASILY damage their system?
Even if they're not planning on overclocking, My current Motherboard requires that I select the MHz to run at. If I have to play a guessing game while trying to set this, couldnt I potentially damage the chip?
Mhz rating should be required listing, like The Ingredients list on food or, a much better example, the Required Voltage on electronics.
Most of the root posts I'm reading here essentially say the following:
I guess my subject line is a really nice way of saying you guys don't get out much. Who the hell are you kidding?
The reason that there are marketing departments is because people are sheep. Every huge corporation in the world depends on it. If people weren't sheep, they wouldn't pull all of the shit that they do. Why do you think Intel has been trumpeting their '2 GHz' speed capability so loud, despite the fact that core clock is becoming extremely distant from the actual throughput of a processor?
Answer: people are dumb.
Be happy that you're actually sitting there thinking about the issue, regardless of which 'side' you are on, because most everyone else isn't.
Rock
Why not just use bogomips?
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Who has the biggest engine? This question was part of the muscle car wars fought by the automakers in the 1960's. It would not have worked if Ford introduced a 427 cid engine and GM countered with a 400 cid, calling it the GM4500.
It took a while, but consumers learned that some smaller engines had greater horsepower than another, larger engines. (I won't even talk about torque in this discussion!) The same will hold true for CPU speed. By obfuscating the clock speed, consumers may believe that they are being lied to. AMD believes that Intel is obfuscating speed issue by concentrating on clock speed. In a real sense, they both are.
Intel does a few things very well. Marketing is one of them. I remember a commercial about 6 - 7 years ago where Intel warned customers about using an alternate brand of math co-processor. It featured a "jack-in-the-box" plugged in into the motherboard. This would be minor league compared to what they could do next. Intel has great brand recognition, and people are familiar with "those funny blue guys". I have to believe that there are folks in a conference room this very minute planning the bombs they will be dropping in the form of TV commercials.
IMHO, AMD should have played the game the same way Intel has. A mass-market educational marketing campaign could have been devistating to Intel. Instead, they have handed Intel the combination to their safe.
(
... it's the difference between AMD losing market share because the average person looks only at MHz when buying a computer and levelling the playing field to reflect an AMD processor at a lower MHz performing the same as a P4 at a higher MHz.
See this article. AnandTech points out that MHz is NOT everything. (I'm sure there are countless more benchmarks and articles like this one).
By implying that it is more important than it actually is.
By implying that a 1.6GHz PIV is faster than a 1.4GHz Athlon.
Yes, the nick is flamebait
Clock speeds don't tell you very much about a chips performance. There are so many other variables to take into consideration. Too many people think that the clock speed tells all. Mabey it's a good thing that are hiding the clock speed from the consumer.
If the mirror is down you can always try this one.
The MHz value isn't everything, unless you happen to manufacture a chip with the biggest MHz value.
This really is a standard procedure. It has probably been used by all CPU and machine makers. But as I've migrated from a 60 MHz system to a 333 MHz one, and again to a 1 GHz one, I've noticed that the numbers pretty much correspond to the actual user experience.
"Mandrake 8.0"
"Red hat 6.0"
Nothing new here.
AMD should have gone out there and marketed their superior architecture in terms the average consumer would be interested in. Perhaps having a test tube filled with nitro in one, and an equivalant amount of gas in another. Ignite both on screen one at a time, voice saying, "This is your computer running the other guys highest MHz processor (gasoline-fileld test tube simply burns); This is your computer running Athlon at our highest MHz (show nitro blowing!)" Then a blurb about why AMD's designers were able to crank the most out of their creation.
Instead, they are admitting that Intel is setting the benchmark on performance. Goodbye market share. I am very disgusted... but then again, I ain't no marketing guy so what do I know?
I was especially concerned in reading the article to see that AMD is requiring board/bios makers to NOT display the chip speed on startup.
....
I was all set to go AMD in the next month or so in my next machine but with this kind of thinking I might as well stay Intel... better the devil you know then
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Now, let's do the same thing with CPI. Instead of "Megahertz GOOD!", let's all stomp our feet and say, "CPI BAD!" I'm thinking of that metallica parody here. Anyway, people understand golf scores, where lower is better -- they can be made to understand that lower CPI is better. So why doesn't AMD come out with an ad campaign saying, "The pentium 4's average CPI is 97, and ours is just 2. Therefore, our chip is FIVE TIMES as fast as a p4 at the same clock rate!!"
The problem with this is twofold.
Firstly, anyone remotely sane will pick out the "at the same clock rate" line and be suspicious. Machines with higher CPI ratings tend to have higher clock rates to compensate.
Secondly, CPI for _throughput_ is likely to be in the 0.5-1 range for almost all systems, due to pipelining (issue 1-2 instructions every clock on average, and no matter how long they stay in the pipe before being retired, your throughput is 1-2 IPC). In practice, stalls would kill this for really long pipes, but there will *always* be benchmarks that perform well. I've had to benchmark this kind of thing. You wind up with numbers all over the map.
In summary, I think the only benchmarks that will make sense will be those that more-or-less accurately represent the real workload the machines are going to be exposed to (gaming benchmarks for the gamers, office suite benchmarks for office workers, etc.). It isn't a surprise that these are the best benchmarks, but with the architectures being compared diverging, it looks like they're the _only_ valid benchmarks.
When the market is so tight and the economy is so down... It also sounds legitimate to me from comsumer point of view.
What everyone should be doing, and AMD should be trying to start is a comparison of performance instead of MHz.
Let's compare to the auto industry. Cars are often timed against standard benchmarks, such as 0-60 mph time and 1/4 mile times. Displacement of an engine is a rough indicator of its output, but the true output varies widely. Likewise, even horsepower and torque ratings don't tell how fast a car will go, because too many other factors like weight, gearing, transmission choice, traction and aerodynamics will all play factors.
Too many people know this, and so they look to see how the car actually performs based on a few standard real-world tests. This is the approach that AMD should be taking. Trying to confuse consumers by hiding the real MHz is not the right way to go about it. Educating customers is. I really don't see why AMD would have trouble competing considering they have better chips at half the price.
Those who know won't buy Intel, and those who don't should be asking someone who does.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
It seems like knowing the x86 architecture, it's possible to design some code that would execute in a known number of instructions, and with basic knowledge about the athlon's instruction cycle, it would be possible to calculate the actual speed of the chip. What about speed comparisons to current chips? They can't be too different on very simple things like repeated addition, stuff like that... Perhaps the number can be calculated by comparison to current hardware....
-S
>The P150+ was actually a 133Mhz chip
Actually, I'm wrong. The P150+ was a 120, the P166+ was a 133.
Now I don't object to AMD doing this, I think that it's a great move on their part to "keep up" with intel. The only problem is that they don't have the real number ANYWHERE. It should be in the BIOS, etc. The only thing that I'm worried about is lawsuits like the one mentioned as possible in the article (bob buys "Athalon 1600" PC, finds out it runs at 1400, and sues) will get common fast by people who think that they are being ripped off when instead it's just the opposite. The performance is just as good if not better than a 1.6ghz P4 and at what, half the cost (don't quote me on this, let's not start a flame war on how I don't feel like checking pricewatch right now).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The Athlon cannot win in the consumers eyes since the P4's big fault of branch misprediction (and clock throttling) is really hard to educate the general public about.
.18 process competes against a 3-4 Gig P4.
I wonder how hard (How much money) it would be for AMD to create an Athlon with a 40 stage pipeline with the same core logic as the Athlon. Yes this processer would run slower than the Athlon 4 and take an exta 100-200% of extra die space but it could be advertised at 2-3 times the same clock speed as the P4. Make it socket A compatable.
Somebody could come up with a benchmark that uses all 40 stages. That would make this guy more than twice the performance as the P4.
Intel would then have to educate the public as Athlons 5? with a clockspeed of 5+ Gig on a
Call it Athlon Elite and price it at $1000 per.
This numbering convention won't be any different than calling 266mhz bus ddr ram 2100 ram or calling 200mhz bus ddr ram 1600 ram. We still refer to the chip as thunderbird or palimino(sp?) it's not going to effect anything and I'm sure that you'll still be able to look up real specs. It's not going to be any more or less confusing for your average consumer than it all ready is. And as long as your Athanlon 1600 is faster than your Athalon 1400 then everything should be kosher. The Athalon 1600 is still going to kick the shiznit out of the P4 2Ghz. http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1524 HA HA HA!
I believe one of AMD's biggest struggles has been in gaining the respect of consumers... maybe even more with "geeks" than everyday PC buyers. Until fairly recently, AMD CPUs and VIA chipsets made people think "crap." AMD's image has improved greatly more recently. Doing something like this implies AMD has something to hide or is feeling inferior. I think they would be better off poking fun at Intel's "faster but slower CPUs."
I think a few people have bought an HP 600
;)
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
...Apple is going to call their next computer the G4000.
Consumers would look at the benchmarks instead of the mhz, and then make a decision for themself.
6
http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1524&p=
Price / Performance AMD is winning, and the p4 2.0 isn't all that much ahead of the Athlon 1.4
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Funny how the clock on my mobo is 100, but the cpu claims to run at 200fsb.
Kinda funny how you didn't even specify your name.
There's a lot to be said for the fact that he actually has BOTHERED to write all this shit. He could easily be working for some company and getting paid big bucks, no matter how lame-ass you claim his code is. You people are lucky Rob even made slash's code free open source in the first place.
Personally I think a lot of the people in the open source community are idiots, and this is why.
Why will people want to share their code if all they get is attacks on their character like this, all based around small fragments of code?
Go find some child to molest or something. I'm sure you'll enjoy it more anyway.
*grr*
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Several months into this, when they haven't sold any cpu's, the moron who dreamed this up will be fired, or politely encouraged to resign, and they'll go back to the way it was before.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
MHz is obviously not a h;ard and fast guage to a processors overall power, so why not be a bit more detailed in how you describe a processor:
4 tests: Dhrystone, Whetstone, Integer, Floating point. all guaged on a scale from AA -> ZZ with for example, Dhrystone AA = ~2000 MIPS and ZZ being something that could conceiveably be possible in a CPU 700 or so generations down the line. Apply similar scalings over the other three benchmarks (or whatever benchmarks you determine to be meaningful) and you have somethng that means more to the customer than plain old MHz
AMD processor x: AA/AB/AC/AB
Intel processor y: AC/AA/AA/AB
Someone who does CAD for a living may be advised by some consumer PC pagazine that Column 1 is what to look for in a processor, and can choose accordingly. A Gamer may be looking for other factors.
5 years down the line, a processor may be billed as BR/BC/BP/AZ, which will still be meaningfull compared to other processors of it's age.
Of course you'd be fighting an uphill struggle to get chip makers to publish the standard code when promoting their latest monster, let alone use it as part of their model number. It would certianly help people researching buying a new pc or processor to make an informed descision as to what they were actually buying.
EMACS?! VI?! I target the individual bits on my HDD by diverting the path of cosmic rays through sheer willpower alone!
Ok, some software like 3D rendering does have performance specs, but the vast majority of software has no attention paid to performance, by consumer or programmers.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
This is a fantastic idea and should have been adopted a long time ago. Car manufacturers don't name their cars after the engines in them, the same should be done with PC's. In my opinion I think computers as a whole should have standardized class ratings, such as Class A computer: Has a 500 mhz or higher processor, 16mg or higher video card etc..the class ratings can be updated every year or so.
This would make it so much easier for software manufacturers to develop for computers...similar to consoles, but with the multi purpose of the PC.
So, how does one look up the proper jumper settings for the motherboard if one doesn't know what #!@*ing speed it is! Or will there be a speed conversion chart...
"If you have a model 1600, use 14x core/bus ratio, but if you have an 1800, use the 16x ratio. If you have a 2000, still use the 16x. We just thought 2000 was a better name."
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
The clock speed DOESN'T have any direct bearing on the system's performance. What's dishonest about this? I mean, the Mustang 5.0 always had a 4.7 liter engine...what's the big deal?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yes, people our new improved P4.5 runs at a whooping 3 GZ! AMD is so far behind, they no longer even admit what they run at!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This must mean the Athlon 1600 just can't compete with the awesome power of the Atari 2600!
I'm headed for E-Bay right now!
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
Socket A for AMD and Socket 462 for Intel.
I won't be selecting "AMD" on 's CPU Type select box.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
i don't know how many slashdoters are willing to drop out of the biggest dick mhz war for better performance, so why should joe average?
Take your Radio Shack police scanner, open your box, and place the antenna near your Athlon. The scanner will lock onto the radio waves and display the frequency of the chip. You might have to set the scanning range to limit the search frequencies. Works for me.
An idea: rather than giving the chip a model name of "Athlon 1600", call it something like "Athlon 1.6GHZ". The hertz is, of course, the SI standard unit of frequency, and the standard specifies that the abbreviation 'Hz' be spelled with a lowercase 'z'. So "1.6GHZ" cannot be a frequency; it must be a model name.
eweek article about Intels misleading Mhz.
You know, things you have to do every day.
NTRPH: NT Reboots Per Hour...
UEAPT: Unrequested Explorer Add Popup Time
R/.E: Resistance to Slashdot Effect.
PCRT: Paperclip Rise Time--how long does it take Word's paperclip to go from not on the screen to fully erect?
CSDP: Chance your machine will solve one of those "Distributed Problems" and you'll win money.
Okay, I'll stop...
Intel strategy: market the product first and then build it. We've all seen how well this works.
AMD strategy: engineer solid product first and then come up with marketing scheme.
I really don't care what they do marketing-wise, as long as the chip is well-engineered, which it is. NetBurst anyone?
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
How is this 'a dirty marketting trick'? The dirty trick is how they are rated today, totally different chips being compared on a MHz rate that only is significant between two exactly similar chips.
Trust the benchmarks, not the box tops.
Will this break certain OSes that don't anticipate the witholding of this info?
nitro hemi cuda
If anyone looks at the line of MIPS processors in SGI machines, the processors are arranged by model number instead of speed. Of course this led to a bit of confusion on which performed better when i was first learning about the machines. For example the R4600 processor came before the R4400 but wasnt as strong of a processor. The R4600 normally came in at 133MHz while the R4400 was clocked at 150, 200, and 250 Mhz. To somebody who didnt know this it could be quite confusing. AMD needs to avoid this pitfall. But that is only part of the battle. Consumers NEED to be educated on what a benchmark is and why MHz isnt important anymore. If consumers are exposed to the basic performance tests and see which processor truely performes better, they can make an informed decision.
"I've figured out what's wrong with life: It's other people." -Dilbert
Governments with lack of money have tried to print more money. This works pretty bad and have in famous cases led to hyper inflation (you all know about 1000 000 000 DM for a piece of bread).
Will this happen here? Will Intel and Motorola reply? Can we look forward to the Athlon 90 000, PIV 7.7T etc?
This was written by an "AP Technology Writer".
So what "model number" will the Hammer series be? Will they try to compare to Itanium clock speeds? And what will they use as the comparison? If it's 32-bit apps? 64-bit apps?
;-)
And will that be the Athlon 5, or 6, or 7? Maybe they can license the Pentium name, after all, it's only marketing
Apple has both ADC and VGA connectors.
If you want, you can use both to get 2 monitors.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
This sounds alot like what cyrix did with their M-II series of processors, I ended up buying a Compaq system without doing much research, which marketed their cpu as a "Cyrix M-II 366", which was really just a 250 MHz system which supposidly performs as well as a PII 366 at the time, which was complete bullshit.
Um, no. And I'm not even talking about Q3 640x480. ;-)
Try the SPEC website, and look at CPU2000 results.
And, you know what? Within a week, we all sigh with relief, because the old units never worked anyway!
Disagree again. What do you find wrong with SPEC? Its a very useful tool for measuring CPU and memory subsystem performance (bearing in mind that for many applications other factors are important as well - which is why application benchmarks are necessary).
When was the last time you heard the MIPS or FLOPS rating for a processor? When the RISC processors came out, and scored 100 x the nearest CISC chip, we suddenly started hearing how worthless those ratings really were. (Which was true, only the people saying it had been using them to crush the competition under their feet, the previous week.)
Coincidentally, I looked at Dell's 800 Mhz. Itanimum SPECint and SPECfp numbers this morning, along with Athlon and P4. Quite interesting. The integer performance of Itanium has been pretty abysmal so far (Athlon and P4 are both about twice as fast on average)- I can't wait for the Hammer processors myself...
What's the FLOPS rating for a Pentium IV? Anyone seen it listed on any of Intel's adverts? Curious, that.
Athlon 1.4, DDR: CINT2000 495, CFP2000 426
Pentium 4 1.8, RDRAM: CINT2000 596, CFP2000 618
Before screaming about how non-representative these scores are, you should read about the SPEC2000 methodology. It's fairly rigorous, and the benchmarks are actual real-world programs.
The benchmark scores reflect the ratio of the tested system to a Sun Ultra5_10 with a 300MHz processor. This means the P4 is (on average) 6.18 times faster at running the SPECfp benchmark suite.
Nothing is perfect, but SPEC is a useful CPU/memory benchmark.
186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
But the consumers are too stupid to know that. Gigaflops are the real benchmark (and long pipelines slow branches down). That's why some ignorant arses think that the P4 is actually faster than Athlon or G4.
Repeal the DMCA!
because of misleading marketing. Then you better not buy Intel either. Remember when Intel was saying that the PIII would make your internet experience better? What a bunch of crap.
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
Why do /. ers like to insult people who aren't programmers or engineers or in some tech related field?
...because we can.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
The model number of a Mercedes is the engine displacement. A 500 SEL is a 5 liter engine. Merceded trusts the judgement of the consumer, AMD is obfuscating and treating their customers with contempt plain and simple
Free cell phone tracking
Monitor Advertising became regulated because of the same deceptive trade practices. That 15" monitor wasn't really 15" of screen, it was case size. Due to a vast number of complaints and litigation, monitor manufacturers are now required to display the Viewable Image Size. This was considered deceptive advertising. It is quite possible that AMD will encounter the same problem if they are truly trying to "mislead" the uninformed.
Here's what will really happen:
Joe Average Consumer will walk into the store
He will see an "Intel Pentium 4" at "2 GHz"
He will see an "AMD Athlon Thunderbird Palomino 4" at P2000+
He won't have a clue what P2000+ means
He's familiar with the terms "Megahertz" and "Gigabyte"
He looks in frustration for the MHz rating on the AMD system
He associates a known benchmark, "GHz" with Intel >br?
"Intel Inside" becomes a mark of quality
If AMD ever catches up in clockspeed again, they will have to spend years fighting the perception that their products are inferior to Intel's. By the time they start to gain acceptance, Intel will have something else up its sleeve.
How do I know this? It already happened. Haven't you ever seen an "Intel Inside" logo? Only last time there was a pretty big group of competitors that backed the P rating and gave credibility to the standard.
ps. The new slashdot is hell on lynx
MHz are not representative of the actual speed of the chip.
AMD is adopting the Apple's method, remember their slogan ?
'Forget MegaHertz, we're talking GigaFlops'
G4 400 Mhz faster than Athlon 1.4Ghz faster than P3 2GHz
jeri
I'm not so sure that you could call this a "dirty trick". The MHz myth was expounded on here in /. recently. It'll be a nice change of pace to see chips benchmarked by true performance rather than artificial measurments.
But that's just my opinion.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
The standard is not CPI, it's MIPS: millions of instructions per second.
For people used to comparing Intel with SPARC, ALpha, PPC and other similar chips, the standard measures for CPU performance are MIPS and FLOPS (floating Operations per sec).
Essentially, one "MIPS" (or MIP) is 1,000,000 instructions per second. If you have a 1,000 MHz chip that does 4 instructions per cycle, then you get 4,000 MIPS.
Another chip that also does 4 instructions per cycle (.25 CPI) but that opeates at 200MHz only accomplishes 800 MIPS.
So you can't rely on Cycles Per Instruction as the only measure of performance. Rely on MIPS.
Marketing theirs as "just as fast as" or "equivalent to." Or Apple, or anyone else.... Hmmm.... And just because it's not printed directly on the chip/BIOS/bootup, how hard is it going to be to determine the clock speed, for anyone who cares?
Why do we always see comparisons of 2.0ghz P4's vs 1.4ghz Athlons? Even a 1.4ghz P4 vs. 1.4ghz Athlon doesn't make much sense.
I would rather see a comparisons of CPU's at the same price point. "Intel's $150 CPU vs. AMD's $150 CPU".
Of course, maybe you would need to include the cost of RAM in that evaluation as well, since the P4 (for now) uses the vastly more expensive and stupid RDRAM. So I guess an even better comparison would be, "a $1200 Athlon system vs a $1200 P4 system". Of course then there's debates on how to equip the systems... the AMD CPU+compatible RAM would be like $300 cheaper, so where do you spend the xtra cash? More RAM? Better vid card? Still, although less precise, it's more of a real-world comparison.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
So, what is the advantages of a 64-bit architecture?
It can address much more than 4Gb of memory (most people dont need this)
It can use larger integers (who the hell factorizes primes anyway)
But on the other hand, all pointers take up double space...
When will we start hearing about the 64-bit-myth?
The size of an engine is still import for a car. Because most people drive rice rockets now, they dont know jack about cubes.
Simply put big cubes equals big power, and always more torque when the horsepower is the same! Even if you car didnt come with lots of power the more cubes you have the more output potential it has; simplely put it has a bigger hole to dump fuel in. This is the reason why muscle car from the 60s were so fast. Big cubes, and big low end torque.
EXAMPLE
A 454 cubic V8 with 400 HP will ALWAYS accerate the same car with a 400 HP 3.0 liter inline 6 faster. Why? Because of low-end torque.
If the 454 peaks HP at 4500 RPMS and the 3.0 Liter at 7000 RPMS, Then the torque at 5000 rpms for the 454 is 467 foot/pounds where as the 3.0 liter output is only 300 foot/pounds!
However the inline six maybe faster at the top end because that is where the engine gets its power.
However many Americans care about drag racing and this is way Americans cars still have big cubes because drag racing is a test of acceraltion which is just really torque.
Got any?
I really don't have much of a problem with AMD hiding the MHz in marketing campaigns or ads, although it is a dumb marketing move. The main thing I'm angered about is that they won't even reveal the MHz publicaly (not even in the BIOS as the article says). That's really pushing it. And I was just really starting to respect AMD.
I have an Athlon and like it. I will stick with Athlons until Intel really comes up with something better for the money. I don't bite off on the Mhz myth - I KNOW an Athlon is faster than the equivalently-clocked P4. I still want to know the clockrate.
I buy the chip and it is MINE to do with as I please. Right now I do not overclock my 700MHz chip because it is f*ckin' hot enough as it is (and has a correspondingly huge heatsink). However, when I was using intel chips before, I overclocked every damn one of them. In the future I may wish to overclock MY AMD chip. If I know what the MHz is supposed to be NORMALLY I can take various factors into consideration and make a reasonable decision as to how much I am willing to overclock MY Athlon. If I don't know the MHz and multiplier setting, then I can't make a properly informed decision about overclocking.
Tell me the NORMAL rated speed and I will be able to decide if I wish to push it, and how far.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Well, anyone who really wants to know will know where to look for the true MHz numbers, maybe he'll also know what these numbers are telling him. Since the advent of the P4 comparing MHz numbers for different processor types has become utterly useless, and even before it was just good enough to tell if an Athlon and a P3 played in the same league. Anyone who wanted to know about the performance for a specific app looked it up, and i don't bother much about the types who have too much money to throw it after a 2GHz P4. Most of those would probably be served better with the framerate of q3demo for a reference, but honestly it's not my problem.
Nevertheless the MHz Hype never ended, first AMD used it when they crossed 1GHz, now intel uses it shamelessly with the differently designed P4, not bothering people too much with too many gooey details like pipeline length. Well, still MHz sells, and probably the shops will find a way to clue the customers up about that number if it helps sell.
The sad part about it is, that the MHz number hade quite a little use, for example to compare two Athlons only differing in MHz-rate, knowing that the last 100 MHz gave you a 4% performance boost for a specific ppp, you can't hope for more for the next 100 MHz upgrade. Also it was quite helpful to judge the difference between say a 100 and a 133 FSB, with the same MHz-rate. But as i said, the numbers will be there for those who want to know em.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Intel got out of the MHz business a long time ago when it introduced the iCOMP to show its chips growing performance linearly even though clock speeds weren't keeping pace (we're talking way back in the 50-MHz pentium days when AMD wasn't an issue and Intel was just trying to keep the press from spanking it).
iCOMP is a combination of several benchmarks and some hincky math (I've seen the formula--eeugh). Its saving grace is that it's applied uniformly to all parts. Marketing weasels can't get around standardization.
The fact is, one benchmark, be it "how fast does it tick?" to "how long does it take to decode the human genome?" is a worthless way to pick a computer. Look at all the benchmarks you can find. Understand the systemic issues in each test setup. Evaluate the use cases you will put to the computer. And if someone waves a benchmark at you and says "bias! this has bias!" say, "of course, it's biased towards the processor that runs that software faster."
--Blair
"If you don't run the software faster, you lose."
Consider the PowerPC G1, G2, G3, G4's... In this case, consumers wanted to know *how much* better the new processor was than the first - was it worth the upgrade? Clockspeed sort of just came out. If the name is too arbitrary, it doesn't help to hide clockspeed.
If they have purposely misleading model numbers such as amd1600, then some people may not question it.
What about the motherboards that are already on the market? Won't these report the clock speed? I heard that the Palomino will work with some existing mobos like the Abit KG7, but maybe im wrong?
Apple is doing this now -they face dwindling market holding because they are oft-seen as the easy-to-use-but lacking power solution. Not so. Truth be told, Apple could blow away any PC proc based on a purely MHz rating too - this from a die-hard PC user - but this is not the forum for that debate...
Apple has taken the high road. They have begun to educate users en-mass about the problems of relying on the MHz rating. Sure we know better: Intel cannot benchmark equal to AMD on a MHz rating because they cannot run the same number of operations per second. Thats simple math.
The analogy I like is who has more light: if everyone 100 light bulbs but all mine are 100 watt and everyone elses are 60 watt, everybody can see that the 100 watt bulbs are going to produce more light, but it still seems like everyone is comparing the number of bulbs - "Its got to be brighter becasue they have more bulbs!"
AMD has gone the opposite way in the analog, like saying we're giving you 60 bulbs but the amount of light will be the same as intel's 100 bulbs. And most people are still stuck saying "ya but you're ripping me off for 40 light bulbs!" AMD needs to take a better look at how the big picture will appear to the public, are they looking for more light, or more bulbs?
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" -- Red Green
I don't think AMD converting to a model number is relevant in any respect. When we discuss differences in performance, there are two types to consider. Benchmark difference and perceivable difference. Just because the 2Gz Intel rated a 167 on the MS Office benchmark and the 1.4 Ghz AMD only rated a 152 does not mean anyone can actually tell the difference when running Office, checking thier email or surfing the web. At this point in the game marketing and price are everything, AMD has been the price leader for a long time, now they are attempting to out market Intel and only time will tell if it works.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussoli
Does the Marketing Dept. get to decide the rating or do the engineers?
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
What it is with us geeks? We say they should start a marketing plan explaining why MHz doesn't matter as much as people think it does? People use MHz not because they know what it means, but because it is a number. 1000 is better than 700, 700 better than 400 etc.
I could just see the commerical now:
"AMD wants you and your family to know that how many cycles a second your central processing unit is capable of pulling off is only one element of the over all preformance. You must take into account the floating point operations per second, and the standard number of operations per second among other things. Here is a graph displaying the result of 50,000 depth first parsing algorithms being executed at different intervals. You should note that the while the new Pentiums have slightly better memory through put and execute a bit faster when the L1 and L2 cache run out and the CPU much operate on data from core, the AMD preforms better over all. Of course you must also take into account whether it is high end graphics or pure scientific computational... """
Imagine folk music and a dog running though a field in slow motion while a commercial talk guy says that to your average moron.
I am sure that will be VERY effective!
only on the TwinView card, numb-nuts. Doesn't ANYBODY EVER read the data sheets?
That was classic intercourse!
since I have 2100 memory then I must be... oh wait, you say it is a marketing gimick? AAAAAAAAAGH
Basically, AMD is playing off the publics ignorance. Without the average consumer knowing the true differences between the P4's and Tbirds, all they have to go on is a higher number.
I agree that AMD should beef up their advertising. I hardly ever see anything about an AMD chip in any computer unless its from a Gateway add.
I don't agree with AMD pulling this stunt just for PR, but then again, its the publics perception that generates revenue and thus keeps our beloved AMD rolling along. There are, however, better ways that they could go about doing this...
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zap.....
You sir get a +5 for having a clue.. He he he. Spec is a wonderful cross platform non synthetic benchmark. In the PC world though winbench and friends are useful too. The Quake as a benchmark idea is good except for the fact that much of the code being executed in quake (or some of the other benchmarks, like the mpeg encoding ones) are hand tuned for a particular processor and platform. When this happens it becomes a useless benchmark in my book. Its sort of like the base vs peak numbers in SpecInt. For the most part almost all the applications out there arn't tuned for a particular processor so why should the benchmarks be. Even now I have benchmarks, I wrote to demonstrate that the 286 could be faster than a 386 at the same clock rate, that run faster on 10 year old hardware than the modern stuff. Optimization can be viewed as simply a matter of knowing diffrent methods for doing the same thing and picking the one that happens to run faster on your target.
Actually, it's about time a cpu vendor started doing this.
Benchmarks suck, but measuring your performance soley by MHz sucks worse.
Hopefully now benchmarking will be revived, and evolve into something more meaningful than it already is. Perhaps the recently released AIM benchmarks will play a role, who knows. nbench isn't horrible (compared to pure MHz comparisons). Forget bogomips - they might actually be worse than a pure MHz comparison.
Seems that this tactic has already proven it's ineffectiveness with Cyrix's PR ratings.
RFC2119
As long as there are benchmarks, there will be ways to skew the results in favor of who you want to 'win' the test. Especially when the money funding the lab/entity doing the benchmarking comes from the marketing budget of an interested party.
IMHO, all this cock-measuring bullshit needs to come to a stop if the industry is going to meaningfully advance past where it is now. What does it matter whose processor is the fastest, when the computer already spent 95% of its time waiting for the user to do something, ten years ago?
~Philly
Mhz has always been the CPU benchmark for as long as I can remember. Changing that benchmark will be catastrophic to AMD...they will either learn that this is stupid and go back to the Mhz ratings, or loose the decent chunk of market share they have gained. Either way my shares will plummet even lower i can guarantee.
I know that MHz doesn't mean alot anymore. The PROBLEM is that by labeling 1.4MHz cpus as AMD 1600, thay are decieving customers (either on purpose or intentionally) as to the true clock speed. This reeks of the old Cyrix scheme of naming cpus by "performance rating", which basically meant they were selling 166s as 200s. They confused many, many people.
;-P
If, as AMD says, MHz doesn't matter, then they should educate the public, instead of selling ambiguously labeled cpus.
Oh well, we'll always be able to get the REAL speeds from enthusiast sites.
How will this affect overclocking? Particularly if AMD is truly successful in thoroughly hiding the true clock speed from the user in both the BIOS and OS? (Not that that will happen- XP is shipping with code that will still report the clock, as Tom's is reporting.) Clock speeds can change (as in overclocking), but model numbers never should.
This is nothing new. Cyrix used to do this. My OpenBSD firewall runs on a Cyrix P-120, which is 100 MHz chip they claimed performed equally to a 120 MHz Pentium.
At least Cyrix was more open about doing this.
PGL, professional gamers league... Officially cancelled because AMD thought it'd take flak from Columbine.
I am one of the top game players for shit, and I love making money that way(I just spend it back at them)...
Loosing nerve like that is sad. I actually liked their company for a while.
God spoke to me
Anyway, why am I being modded down? Look at my posting history :(
...and I could care less!
All I care is:
1) Is it cheap.
2) Does it twiddle bits about, preferably as fast as possible.
I dont give a shit about khz or mhz or ghz or thz, I just want a fast 'puter.
What we need is not to keep going on with this CPU Speed game of the fastest chips. What we need to do it get the CPU companys to work on increasing bus speeds of motherboards and all ports and buses. In theory if you have a computer with every bus at the same speed the computer would have no wait time. The little hourglass icon could be deleted off of your system cause there would be no waiting. That is what cause slow down today is the bus speeds not the CPU. If you are running a P4 2Ghz of AMD 1Ghz there is not much different both are powerfull enough to kill most anything app you try to run. if you drop the CPU to 600Mhz and increase all buses to 600Mhz that would kill any of todays processor. Tell me what you think on this subject
That is my thought. I could be wrong; gostf
Better make that A200108. What, were you born yesterday?
dont forget cat /proc/cpuinfo.. it's never failed to give me a reliable clockspeed rating
Dude...
You are an idjit.
I remember people bitching about Apple's use of real world applications (Photoshop) in performance comparisons.
Now they are crying out for comparisons based on real world applications?
Somebody help me.
Case in hand: if AMD really means to label the 1.4GHz part 'Model 1600', that implies that it is only equivalent to a P4/1.6Gig - in fact, in many cases it is faster than that. But since this kind of marketing gimmicks make it seems like AMD is trying to hide something, cynical people will just assume that even this is a bloated claim, borne out of desperation.
AMD, please reconsider. From someone running a Duron 600 and proud of it.
Regards,
Michel
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
my eyes, my beautiful eyes
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
Um.... guys.... Time to go back to the old slashcode. First time I loaded this story I got all the images from slashcode (ie the brown "slash" at the top and whatnot) instead of the normal /. images..... But it was still using the /. html colours.
LET ME POST DAMMIT! Did Microsoft release a new version of slash I don't know about? Should I look out for the blue about:mozilla of death?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
If was doing marketing for AMD, I'd stress this to hell and back. Show how Intel has "a lot of gigahertz" but not much "performance" or "power". Make it look like Intel was somehow trying to deceive you by quoting clock speed rather than how fast your applications run. Then show the prices for equivalently powerful chips. Maybe throw in a quip or two about whether you want to buy the name "Pentium" or buy computing power.
Do I get the job?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Now Moore's new law will say that the processor model # will double every 18 months.
not really 'instructions per second'. folks want to know how much faster is it, given a fixed cost constraint, over the competition.
if you can say 'the equivalently-priced P4 to our K7 takes twice as long to scan and save your photos', that is a clear communication to the buyer.
only techies care about instructions/second and pipeline depth, and so on.. users can relate more to how much they have to pay on one brand vs. another to get the same performance.
measure performance in common terms, like the photo example I used. address things like: working on large spreadsheets, doing audio/video, doing math (and all that multi-thread processing used by the latest net.virus) - really just doing anything that's heavy on cpu can be used as a way to relate how much you have to spend to get that same job done in the same amount of time.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
What will this do to AMD's fame in the overclocking field? I bought my Athlon Tbird cause 1) it was cheap (3x the price it is now..grr) 2)I'd seen nice benchmarks with it vs. the p3 and the then infant p4 3) you could OC the living daylights out of it
Will we now overclock the model number? that doesnt seem right. I think that it would be a bad move for amd to make it hard for the overclockers, as many, many overclockers use athlon/duron systems (i'm one of them...mine doubles as a BBQ)
I was really looking forward to getting a 1.5-1.7GHz palamalto and overclocking it to around 2GHz (watercooled) and getting killer framerates in whatever i desided to play, but...if i cant overclock, i may stick with my tbird 1GHz@1.1111Ghz...cause overclocking is half the fun
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
It wouldn't be that bad if they gave model names to processors. Afterall there is a lot more to an engine than simply its horsepower, just like there is a lot more to a processor than its clock speed. Car companies have successfully taught the average consumer to look for more than horsepower in a car. In time, compouter companies will teach the average consumer that there is more to a computer than clock speed.
Thank-you AMD!
Sincerely,
An Intel Stockholder
You might be able to overclock your Duron, but we're talking brand-spankin' new Athlon's with the Palamino core. AMD is already redesigning these mobos, bios included as well I'd imagine to prevent little Tommy Tinkerer from screwing with bus seeds and multipliers. I doubt there will be any easy way to overclock these babys, unfortuneately, less another company releases a kick-ass mobo with lotsa features, but you never know, there may be new tactics enforced on this chip to disencourage (word?) overclocking, perhaps some sort of crystal on the chip, or an array of capacitors, or even a voltmeter (you need to screw with the voltage for an ultimate tweak, and AMD knows that). Of course, just like when Intel released this one Celeron, which was jsut a Pentium III with half of the L2 cache disabled and people penciled in a line to connect it again, there will always be a way around everything. Nerds unite! We must battle for our geekdom I don't like the idea of people hiding stuff from me, the consumer, even if it is readily available elsewhere.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
In the article says, WindowsXP had gone gold?
When did it happen? Is M$ are sure that WinXP is gold quality yet?
This is just another reason for benchmarks on all new vendor machines. There are so many figures to factor when looking at a processor these days, the average, un-informed researcher is overwhelmed with data. Which is more important pure mhz or level 2 cache? Why is level 2 cache even important? And what about the companies that put in a faster Duron\Celeron then bottleneck it by only throughing in 64 meg of ram. I can just see people looking at the specs on a computer the way people look at ingrediats on medicine... "128 megs of ram... Thats a good amount of that!" (somewhat obscure Jerry Seinfeld reference).
.02
However, if they are going to implement a benchmark system, they should do it right. It should be one big number that represents all areas of the computer (ram, processor, disk drive speed, video card, perhaps even cd\dvd-rom speed). And also break it down into sections that show each sub-category (ram, processor, etc.). And, of course, it should be cross-platform and all machines should be tested (perhaps weighted properly acoording to the footprint their OS leaves...). And, finally, the software so the end user can test their specific pc and see how it varies from the what the average model got.
This would help smilifly min. req. on software and it would allow tech support to easily determine if there is any deficitancy problems in any area of the pc.
Just my
Athlons come pre-overclocked. AMD is much less conservative about their bin splits than Intel, so driving an AMD product to 1.3X it's rated speed is living MUUUCH more dangerously....
Real great way of saying it. But how to move the customer from I to A. Well if you were around in the early eighties you might have heard this in the system room " we'll never get fired for buying IBM ". This may apply to Intel and AMD.
The only way to do the change if you can get wall street power houses to buy the systems. Once wall street gets hold of something they keep with it for a while.
-onepoint
if you see me, smile and say hello.
If it had been Intel doing this, there'd be 740 screams of rage in this forum instead of 740 apologies for this act of deliberate misrepresentation.
Did any of you know that the P4 actually has a 2x faster internal clock for many processing units? Intel could have claimed it's 1.3Ghz P4 was a 2.6Ghz processor - but didn't. Golly, were they too honest to claim that faster clock rate? Nah, they just knew they could never get away with it. But AMD apparently thinks it can, and YOU LIKE IT. "Lie to us, please AMD, please! We don't mind!"
NO corporation - not AMD, not Intel, not Apple, not Netscape - is your buddy, pal, friend or family. They're ALL in it for the money, DUH! AMD no less than Intel.
Wise up. A corporation cannot return and does not deserve your misplaced loyalty and affection. You do not have a "relationship" with AMD, and Intel is not your "enemy". This is BUSINESS folks! Get over your infantile infatuation with legal constructs that exist only to make profits!
Buy from AMD if they're cheaper and faster or better meet your needs. But don't mistake their need to build market share for a personal favor that they'll keep doing for you if they win the majority of the processor market "just because they really, really like you".
http://www.howstuffworks.com/horsepower.htm -- a detailed description of how horsepower works
(there is also a short description of torque on the 2nd page, which I'll refrain from copy and pasting)
Seriously though, there are corporations - and there are corporations. Style, history, leadership DOES matter, what ever Dr. Marx have written. Yes - they are for the money - but ethics, loyalty, affection are pretty damn material.
  ___
 //  7
(_,_/\
"Mr and Mrs Average might not understand what benchmarks are, or what the numbers mean, but they do understand pretty pictures of Big vs Small.
"
I guess this explains the popularity of porn sites.
That means even the P4s need a rating of their own, but a 2000mhz would only give you a PR1500 rating. While 1400mhz AMD gets PR2000.
who fuckin cares MHZ dont mean fuckin shit anyways performance does. Its smart for AMD cause people are stupid, all they look at is the clock speed.
Everyone knows that a 1GHz Athalon is equivalent to a 1.5GHz Pentium, so who cares? AMD won't suffer by being honest about the clock speed, model numbers are pretty stupid, if they are really so ashamed to admit they can get a better performance per clock cycle then how about model names instead, that could be cool.
I don't think tricking the consumer is something they'll appreciate. They'll feel cheated when they discover they've spent their hard earned cash on something they thought they were going to get, and they didn't.
The simple fact is that this strategy won't work. If AMD try to hide the GHz rating, then people will simply ask what it is. The average person has come to believe that that's how you measure processor speed. If on the other hand, AMD tries to market 1.4GHz chips by implying a higher clock speed, then they might fall foul of advertising and marketing law. It's certainly a shame the average person believes that the important factor is the MHz, but it's the chip manufacturers fault in the end. It's the manufacturers that have always pushed the clock speed as the measure. It's just that at the moment Intel has the higher numbers.
return 0; }
is educate the consumers about the irrelevance of MHz.
They could air an ad along the lines:
- we see two cyclists, (Intel and AMD).
- Intel is furiously pedaling while AMD just glides and overtakes him effortlessly.
THAT should drive the point that MHz is no longer relevant. However, I don't that this ad would be legal (at least in most European countries). I don't know about US though.
This article says it all, really. AMD only have to compete on marketing grounds now. They'll have no problem winning a technical shootout.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
Bogomips ?
I would prefer to see my CpU having both measures :
Mhz
Mflops (floating)
Miops (integer)
=> then we can see wo is the faster...
+ Please remind Itanium is coming...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I'l take an Amiga 4000 thank you. :-)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
AMD can fix this easily: add a 1:2 divider circuit on their clock lines, and voila, instant 2.8GHz Athlon. And if that's too blatant, they can just call it their "hyperthreading NOP engine"; that even doubles the MIPS.
Well, whats the *real* dirty marketing trick:
- deepening the pipeline to get more MHz (while screwing up performance) to use in marketing campaigns
or
- giving the product another (read: better sounding, but maybe misleading) name. At least Athlons *are* better (at the moment)then P4s. BTW, Motorola just renamed the upcoming G5 from "7500" to "8500" some days ago.
Some reasons i think every pc is not a laptop:
-A laptop is twice as expensive for the same specifications.
-Laptops are slower. I have seen laptops that were half as fast as a destop pc that got the same kind amount of memory, same cpu, and the desktop got less Mhz. (Ok, it was not word or excell)
-Most laptops are running on power outlets 80% of the time. battery time is less important for these laptops than you think.
-PC have bigger screens, and a good mouse and keyboard.
-A laptop is twice as expensive for the same specifications.
as a true slashdot reader i must point out the PentiumIV runs faster:
Rapid execution engine:
The Arithmetic Logic Units (ALU) run at twice the speed of the clock, increasing the overall speed.
So if intel wants to play the Mhz game it still has some hidden mhz down there.
Its really to late for this now. Intel has won the battle. Intel planned for the long term when they designed the p4 core. When it started it didnt blow anyones mind away but just yesterday intel demo'd a chip running at 3.5Ghz, no, that is not a typo. 3500Mhz. No matter what anyone says that will blow anything out of the water. Granted it wont be out this year but AMD cannot catch intel now. Intel took the heat and the criticism while it was developing its secret weapon. At first it didnt look like much and people laughed but now it is showing its teeth and it will win. Unless AMD has also been developing something drastic then it is bound to lose, and personally I feel that they have been riding the athlon wave and feeling good about themselves and not planning for the future.
It seems like their going back to being the clone company that they were when they sold 486DXL-100s.
It was nice having them actually competing with a seperate product for a while. Its a pitty the MHz gap has forced them to go back to being the clone/copycat like they were before the athlon.
Why don't they just call their next chip the Athlon 4000... that'll satisfy the marketing chaff requirement (ooh, a bigger number than Intel has) and they won't have to bother faking out the clock speed on the info panel.
So they'l clock like a Lockheed Blackbird, while performing like a Brewster Buffalo; which is what Intel's done with the P4's p8 core.
Personally I think AMD's approach is a lot more honest.
I just to work for a real shitty pc manufacturer here in the UK, who used CYRIX/IBM
processors and Intels.
The IBMS were known as PRXXX+ and whatever else sounded good to the MD, e.g turbo, super
fast e.t.c.
This all appeared on sales literature, and I think the company got its fingers burnt more
than once by the advertising standards dudes.
What I am trying to say, is that there is enough confusion in the home buyer market
nowadays, (mainly due i think to the fast releases of pentiums over the last 3 years) that
reworking the current system of processor rating would be a bad idea.
I feel sorry for the hapless people who bought into cyrix/IBM based boxes, and
are now left with a computer that is practically useless in todays home market, all
because they were confused/lied to/didn't care enough to research when they bought..
Branding chips with power ratings, e.t.c may be the way to go, judging by some of the
earlier posts, but unless all the manu's do it, and keep the OEMs on a tight leash
confusion will rain supreme.
Just my 2 pence
It's a simple consequence of the fact that MHz sells no matter how actual performance is.
If just customers would buy the products for thier real performance and not a single easy manipulated number like the MHz value.
If Intel could make a chip performing as a 700Mhz PII but running at 4GHz, they would try to sell it. That's just as dirty marketing playing on customers naivity.
Some people have used car analogies (the Mustang 5.0 with a 4.7 litre engine), but no one has made the key observation.
Chips are being sold based on the tachometer scale. The P4 revs at 2GHz. The Athlon revs at 1.4GHz. Most of the buying public thinks that the tachometer is actually the speedometer.
So now AMD is painting different lines on the tachometer. They are writing 1600 where 1400 used to be etched. It's going to confuse the mechanics all to hell without doing anything about the ignorance of the buying public.
The whole thing makes AMD look cheap.
How do they go about conveying the message that the Athlon 1400 is a six cylinder engine versus the P4 which is a four cylinder engine?
I remember reading biker magazines about ten years ago. In North America, you had 600cc bikes which redlined in the 16,000 RPM range. In Tokyo, 600cc bikes were not street legal. The biggest bike allowed was in the 250cc range IRRC. So in Tokyo you had these 250cc bikes that redlined at 28,000 RPM. You had to pull 10,000 just to cross an intersection. Isn't that a perfect description of the Pentium 4?
Back when all the other chip cloners were playing games with their product naming, I never bought any of those chips. I feel the same way about rebate stickers: the amount of mental effort required to read the fine print exceeds the expected return from redeeming the coupon (should you be so lucky that a cheque ever arrives). I tend to make my life simpler by looking at only those products "gimmick not included". If the sticker makes me work harder to decide what I'm buying, I don't buy it.
I think AMD is exchanging one bottle of single malt (customers who are influential and know what they are doing) for one Joe-sixpack of American beer. They are heading out into territory that will be fought on marketting terms rather than on technical terms. Good luck to them.
I remember another company that took this route: Gateway 2000. They started off with unbeatable price/performance, and then they veered into big screen TVs and five-disc CD changers. Look at Gateway 2000 now.
How long will it be before the AMD PR2100 and the AMD PR2200 are just the same chip in a different die color?
Though there it is more the MIPS count.
Since DSP's are in 99% of the case full RISC engines, it would make no sense in putting in CPI, since almost every single instruction takes 1 cycle. (i gather most i386 cores will go the same way, though i'd love to see a div or sqrt that works in one tick).
What has been abused it the amount of instructions, and what constitutes an instruction.
Especially TI has been blamed by some people that its MIPS ratings are not thruthfull since they use instructions that are normally one instruction on other DSP's, but here are split in several instruction. Hence generating a much higher MIPS number.
I think any indicator is open for abuse, let alone the trouble marketing would have with explaining multi-stage pipelines/parallel executing units, or the (dis)advantages of RISC versus CISC.
Years ago, in the golden age of the speccie and the C64, kilobytes seemed to indicate to the 'normal man' the performance of a computer. now its Mhz.
who knows.. maybe in a year its vertexes/second.
or gigaflops.
Whoever gets it wrong will be the latter.
Sentry23
So they'l clock like a Lockheed Blackbird, while performing like a Brewster Buffalo; which is what Intel's done with the Pentium 4's p7 core.
Personally I think AMD's approach is a lot more honest.
Traditionally when a new generation core came out, clock for clock it performed better than the previous generation core.
Hence Intel's p5 core (the 1st Pentium) Pentium 100 (100mhz) ran better or equal to a 486 running at 120 to 130mhz. The same thing occured when the p6 core design came out (the core design of the Pentium Pro, Pentium II & Pentium !!! CPUs) - the Pentium Pro 150 performed better or equal to a Pentium running at about 180mhz (especially with full 32bit OSes)
Where as Intel's p7 cored P4 performs noticebly worce, clock for clock, than Intel's previous generation p6 cored P!!!
In effect Intel's gone & performed the same dodgy trick VIA did with their Cyrix III mark II design.
When the Cyrix 3 1st came out it had Cyrix's next generation (Cayenne/Joshua) core, which had the best performing X86 integer core in the game (the 686 integer core), dual 80 bit floating point units, 2 MMX units & 2 3DNow units, 64K L1 cache & 256K L2 cache & it was designed to run on any bus from 50 to 150mhz.
& clock for clock it was a screamer - the Cyrix III (Cayenne/Joshua) PR500 (400mhz model) ran up to 60% faster than a 500mhz Celeron, on the same hardware/software platform, going by Tom's Hardware Guide (I figured I'd link them seeing this thread started with a link with them). But it just wouldn't clock much faster than that, which wasn't good enough for VIA so they replaced the Cyrix III (Joshua/Cayenne) with IDT Centaur's Winchip Samuel core & called that the Cyrix III instead. This Samuel core performed like a dog (it even had no L2 cache, though it did have a K7 like 128KB L1 cache) but it could clock up to a GB, which is what VIA wanted.
The Samuel Winchip cum Cyrix III wasn't/isn't all bad, relatively speaking it runs very cool, VIA even demonstrated it running without a fansink. So it could definitly have a place in X86 based embedded platforms.
Well we still need to know the MHZ of the chip if only to be able to select the correct MB and Memory to work with the cpu. The mother boards will probably then specify which 'models' they work with, but that would not be as clear as 'any cpu up to xxx mhz'.
Guess we could compare bogomips!
BTW the use of both clock edges (133 vs 266mhz) on the FSB is nothing new. The 1 mhz 6800 chips were as fast as the 2mhz 8080's (bus wise anyway) because the 6800 used both clock edges, while the 8080 worked off only one edge. (actually since both used two phase clocks and the 8080 used an asymetrical clock waveform things are a litte different here but the idea is the same. The 6800 spat out the address on one phase of the clock and grabbed the data off the bus on the other phase. The 8080 took two clock cycles to do the same work).
You've got to have some sympathy for them - newbies will buy a P4 1.5 over an Athlon 1.33, which is quite a lot more powerful.
:) (and yes, I am aware just how stupid this is, thank you).
That's what happens when computers are mis-measured. They should use Quake 3 FPS for the chip speeds
Cheers,
Xain
The engine in a cement mixer has more horsepower than the engine in a Miata. But which one goes faster?
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I get sick of seeing MHz being the grand equalizer between chips -- especially when you are talking non-x86 chips. I mentioned to someone the other day that I was running a machine at home that was 170 MHz, and got ridiculed. Never mind that it would run circles around the Celeron POS this person was running.
Click here or here.
Intel inside,
Idiot outside.
:-)
... and did it rather poorly. I own three of the old Cyrix 6x86 chips... one called a P120+ that's really 100MHz, a P150+ that's really 120MHz, and a P200+ that's actually 150MHz. These ran fine, but arguments were made both ways as to whether or not the "P" rating worked out to be equivalent to an Intel chip of that number of MHz.
In the end, it came down to the simple fact that people got annoyed when they realized the speed rating of the chip was pretending to be MHz, but was higher than the actual MHz... especially after purchase. (I knew ahead of time, and read lotsa reviews, but that's not universal behavior).
If they put some marketing money behind a new initiative like this, I think the CPI idea would be much more successful. This wannabe MHz crap has been tried, and when was the last time anyone bought a Cyrix chip for his or her home hot-rod.
... it can to an infinite loop in 12 seconds.
;-)
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Why Y3K!?... you'd be facing the bug already at Y2.1K...
;)
Who did you say was born yesterday?
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
They crash a lot, and have a poor user interface. Ever see an error message on a Mac? A little bomb icon telling you your computer crashed. That doesn't help me much. Have you ever had to deal with an extension conflict???
There is a reason Apple has a smaller market share and it is not because they got out marketed in the chip/Mhz departmart.
Those steppings overclock even better than the famous Celeron 300A.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Why not label the next desktop Athlon (Palamino) the "ATHLON 5" and keep the true MHZ rating. Then they can say "We are a whole family of CPUs ahead of Intel so our 1.5GHZ CPU is the same speed as their 2.0GHZ CPU. Look at the CPU number you can get a Intel Pentium 4 (only four!?!?) or an AMD Athlon 5 (Wow! five) which sounds better to you?"
V2
Yep, I've used an Apple. It was ten years ago, but I've used an Apple.
I think you mean a Mac, though, since only Macs have the little bomb you describe. All I have to say concerning that is if you're having problems then your configuration is having problems because my home computer is perfectly stable these days, be I in 9 or 10.
And I've had to deal with extension conflicts, but I've also had to deal with a corrupt boot partition on Linux and a corrupt registry on Windows. All seem to be around the same level of fun.
You're right, though, it's not because they were out-marketed in the chip department. It's because they were not made the standard by IBM, which people seem to underestimate the power of, even today. IBM made the PC *as we know it* and that's what stuck. Never mind there were PCs before it, it doesn't matter. IBM made theirs and that was the official first coming and what people had to match. So here we are. The better platform still (miraculously) idling by with near 10% retail marketshare at the moment and 5-7% installed base (IIRC). Someday we'll all see the silliness that is Windows and use Something Else but, until then, we're stuck with chips that needlesly pull more power than they should just to get a marketing edge, not a performance one.
I'm just still sitting here amazed that my 450MHz G4 can beat the snot out of many modern chips. Bad, bad design on Intel's part, mainly. AltiVec helps in certain cases, though. =)
there has to be something on the chip that denotes a differance between a 1.4ghz and a 1.6ghz (and so on) chip.
If not, retailers wont be able to tell which one is supposed to be higher price, and if retailers are going to be confused with the pricing of a product, they won't sell it.
RA7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
AMD says they want to help consumers by taking away the megahertz number confusion, but then they slap a big number as the model name that resembles megahertz. WHATS REALLY HAPPENING HERE is that they want people to CONTINUE using the megahertz rating, just as long as they perceive their product's megahertz to be higher than what they really are.
CPU looooong ago stopped being a bottleneck. These days when you sit waiting for Internet Exploder 5.5 to appear after pressing the button, it's the disk that you're waiting for.
Sure, chuck in 128Mb of RAM, that'll cache the disk and solve the problem. Umm. nope. The CPU's are still 10 times faster than the RAM so it's still sitting around spinning, waiting for the data. And Windblow$ is terrible at managing it's paging so it still grinds away at the disk whenever you switch windows anyway.
Sure chuck in 10Mb of level one cache, that'll cache the memory and solve the problem. Have *seen* how expensive CPU's with massive L1 caches are?
My home system is an AMD Ksomething at 500MHz with loads of RAM and the fastest disks and SCSI bus I can afford. It still easily beats the latest and greatest 1.5GHz ATA/5400rpm based systems.
Deleted
I have always wondered why AMD doesn't just implement a clock splitter on the CPU. Then they could be the first with a 3GHZ chip! Who cares that onboard it uses an internal clock of 1.5GHZ? Its the external clock speed that people buy, isn't it?
More like you're some loser who gets batted around by your parents/boss/guy who cut you off on the highway and this is your "outlet" for feeling superior to others because you know what ls or grep means. I pity you.
thank you. i salute your insult. however, you have far understated the situation.
i actually have no idea what either "ls" or "grep" means. i do not consider myself a computer geek. i do happen to have a job supporting several workstations, but it is nothing complex enough to warrant a feeling of technological superiority on my part.
instead, my enjoyment of portraying myself as superior is a life-long characteristic that exists irrespective of situation or occupation.
so you see, you could have not only accused me of being a booger-eating, tech-manual reading, quake-tshirt wearing, weak-limbed nerd -- but you could have further deepened the insult by also calling me not even a l33t nerd; just some guy who runs around feeling superior without even any special technical expertise.
whether you believe all this to be true is, of course, purely up to you. in any case, it's irrelevant to my enjoyment of amusing myself at the expense of others, which is precisely what you did in your chastising reply.
"pity" me all you want. 'sokay. i'm still going to consider everyone as fair game for humor.
c-ya
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Today, AMD seems like they will be naming their future CPUs with a model number as opposed to a clock speed. For example, lets say that AMD considers a 1.2Ghz Athlon to be the equivalent of a Pentium 4 1.4Ghz part. They would then call it an Athlon 1400, or something along those lines. What's worse is that this would also be displayed in the BIOS, so that the true core speed of the CPU would be hidden. Another CPU manufacturer tried this a few years back. Tried and failed.
The reason why AMD is doing this is because at the same clock speed, their Athlon CPUs will easily outperform their Pentium 4 counterparts. However, this does not mean that the Athlon is a superior processor. That decision is to be made by the individual after assessing his or her own processor needs. What it shows is two very different approaches to processor design. In short, Athlon processors get more "work" done in a single clock cycle. In contrast, Pentium 4 processors get less "work" done but at higher rate of cycles per second. Two solutions to the same problem, and both of them are valid. No right solution, no wrong solution. Intel's engineers, in my opinion, picked the better solution. Why? Well for one really simple reason. For the average consumer, megahertz is the one benchmark that measures CPU power. To break this line of thinking takes more marketing money than anyone has. Bigger numbers are better. Honestly, if you didn't know anything about benchmarks and comparative values, wouldn't you think that a Pentium 4 2.0GHz processor was leaps and bounds over an Athlon 1.4Ghz processor?
Another hurdle AMD must get over is that of pricing. AMD's CPUs are indeed cheaper. But AMD will have to price its flagship CPU to compete against Intel's lower end CPUs. Again, because of the MHz difference. In a perfect world, AMD would price its Athlon GHz against a Pentium 4 2.0GHz. At the time of this writing, the cheapest cost of an Athlon 1.4Ghz is $106, while the cheapest Pentium 4 2.0GHz CPUs are being sold for $562 in lots of a thousand. So say around $600 retail or so. Again, in a perfect world, AMD could get away with charging three, four maybe even five hundred dollars for their 1.4GHz CPU. That much more is some cold hard cash. However, this is reality. They are forced to price their CPU against Intel's 1.4MHz offering, which is going for as low as $123.
So what can AMD do? At this stage in the game, the only way to beat Intel would be to do so at their own game. Apple has attempted for years to dispel what they call the "Megahertz Myth ." But have they succeeded? I don't think so. Last I checked, they were receiving subsidies from Microsoft. As I see it, AMD has two choices if it wishes to survive. Either they can cater to the PC Enthusiast's market where they've made some great inroads, or they can develop a part that emphasizes clock speed. It's sink or swim time for AMD, and I'm very curious as to what they do next.
This would be considered to be false advertising in this country... but I doubt the authorities have the guts nor even the knowledge to bother chaising this up.
analogy given about cars over and over, but only in terms *gearheads* understand...this is bad.
Try this on for size (/. or AMD):
The scene from the fast and the furious with
the souped up front wheel drive, turbo, nitrous car (high revs, "cheats" such as nitrous) and label it *ntel (but change the scene at the end, naturally with the crashing, instead they just open the hood and it says *P4*.)
Now the other car (charger/toranado...muscle car, essentially...yeah the honda/supra etc are neat modern cars, but the old style muscle cars still make and *man's heart* skip a beat / get wood / flat out drool seeing that kind of POWER and BEAUTY) is a beast (representing AMD, natch) because while it may not have the rpm/nitrous/tech, it still has what it takes to meet or beat the competition at its own game.
Joe 6pack might understand some of the nuts and bolts...but john q public won't...of the argument/presentation...What J.Q.P will understand is the nostalgia, brute force aspcet that AMD *should* be pushing.
AMD did that with the "train is a coming at you fast" commercial, but that was slightly off even tho they stated "faster clock for clock"... but all I really got was AMD, blah, blah, blah.
Or (SEG) have a "bunny suited" person in a courtroom, Jack Nicolson (sp?) in the witness box saying "you can't handle the truth!!"..."yes, the AMD may be slower, but it has more power then your fastest chip, you've betrayed your country, you have not got the power to compete, so you pump up the #'s to look better.."...or something like that.
Or even more succinct by a poster:
1993: 60Mhz pentium intro
2000: 1Ghz Athlon...2weeks later 1Ghz p3
2001: 2Ghz pentium...1.4/1/5 Athlon
Amazing what a little competition can do, eh?
Anyone recall the lovely 50/66 speed steps that occured every 6 months to a year and $3,000 dollar systems?
Now we have "towers 'o power for $1,000".
Amazing, ain't it.
Moose.
P.S. Even funnier still show a ditch digger shoveling away at "2Ghz" speed...then pan over to a bulldozer at 1.4Ghz speed...
this is your brain on *ntel, this is your brain on Athlon, Any Questions?
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I don't understand this, either. Apple suffers from the same MHz issue, even though their chips are fastest of all at crunching.
MHz is only a valid measurement if the instructions are comparable (not, CISC vs. RISC) and the chips are pegged at 1 instruction per Hz (not, again.)
So, just advertising "Just as fast as a Pentium IV XXX GHz processor!" doesn't cut it with the masses who want a quick and dirty number.
That's fine, as long as the number they pick is the MHz of the equivalent PIV chip. Now shouldn't the AMD 1.4 GHz be rechristened the AMD 2000?
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> The analogy I like is who has more light: if
> everyone 100 light bulbs but all mine are 100 watt
> and everyone elses are 60 watt,
It's interesting you bring up light bulbs since they are in exactly the same boat as processors.
Bulb companies now compete on power useage, so the old 100 watters, for example, now only use 89 watts or something like that, producing the same amount of light. Back in the good old days, wattage was more or less synonymous, much like Hz was in processor chips (even between Intel and Motorola for Apple.) Now it isn't.
Bulbs have an easy-to-use brightness measurement, lumens, that they all brag about on their labelling, now.
AMD is (should) do a similar thing, just use "P IV MHz equivalency" as the number.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Actually this is not new.
When I upgraded to a Pentium-class computer, I bought an AMD PR-133 processor and thought I was getting a 133MHz processor. Only back home I discovered that it really was a 100MHz processor, which was approximately the same speed as a 133MHz Inter Penium.
I don't know have they used this trick in the meantime, but it's now totally new news.
But then again, it seems reasonable. Of course the public will only look at numbers in the name, not real benchmarks etc.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Playing MP3's is an 'application' of a computer, like holding together Ducts is an 'application' of Duct Tape.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If you think MacOS is unstable and crashes a lot, you should try using one of Microsoft's recent operating systems, like Me or 2000. Macs crash when you try to do something strange and unusual to them (or install an extension that does something strange and unusual to them) and the OS doesn't cope with it very well. Windows, on the other hand, crashes frequently under normal operating conditions!
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
The PR rating failed because it made the chips look inferior.
How about a marketing campaign comparing AMD and Intel chips at the same clock speed ?
A 1.4 Ghz Athlon costs the same as a 1.4 Ghz P4, so let Intel try to convince their customers that it is worth it paying more for a higher clock speed.
A series of ads that hammer home the message that the Atlhon blows the doors off the P4 (always comparing the same clock speed) should create the impression that Intel chips are second rate.
Don't say "clock speed doesn't matter"; say "Intel chips are junk - they can't keep up"
AMD has always had a great utility to display information about the running processor. It works on any processor. I've used it on a Athlon/Thunderbird, K6, Athlon, and even an Intel Celery.
http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/cpuinfo.exe [evil-trojan.com ;]
And the driver information page: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/cpuinfo.txt
Worth noting: my AMD processor had an extra 10MHz thrown in free compared to the rating. :-)
This was supposed to be some great russian bear cpu. I hacen't heard poop since over a year ago, what gives?
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
I call BS on this too. High clock rate processors tend to have slightly lower IPC than lower clocked processors simply because they are designed for high clock rates! You acchieve higher clock rates by increasing the number of pipeline stages (or shrinking the process). This tends to increase the average instruction latency. On the otherhand it also increases the througput per unit time. Christ, if at the end of the day the P4 is only 75% as efficient per clock than the PIII but runs at 2x the clock rate in the same process, then intel made the right decision. Its a no brainer! When intel releases the P5 and its 50% as efficient as the P4 and only runs 2x as fast in the same process then you can cry about how they are making chips just to ramp the clock rate. Till then think about what your saying before you say it.
I think the P4 and the K7 core (in their current implementation) are about the same at the end of the day. The real question of course isn't which one has a higher clock rate in a given process but which one has a higer performace. All things being equal the one with the higher clock rates will be easier to sell. On the other hand, if I were betting, as much as I like AMD, I think that Intel has a winner. The current implementation is a seriously cut down version of what the arch will eventually be. Its caches (TLB, Trace etc) are small, its missing a couple pipes, and there isn't yet a SMT version. In other words the current P4 IPC is probably 3/5 of what it will be in a generation or two. Intel proved with the Ppro/PII/PIII that their x86 CPU designers know what they are doing. From where I stand it looks like they are well on their way to a repeat.
It's somewhat unconventional, but I think of the frame buffer as a two-dimensional signal. Similarly, I think of an MRI image as a three-dimensional signal. If you look at the nuts and bolts of graphics processing, it's pretty much like any other signal processing: data ordered along axes, acted on by vector and matrix operations.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
That sounds accurate for analog video. Digital video is both one- and two-dimensional, and consists of a finite number of pixels, etc. Photorealistic games, likewise, have a finite such resolution, but in three-dimensional terms.
But I'm by no means a DSP expert, so I probably sound like an idiot right now. Ignore me at your leisure ;)
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
You just don't get it.. It doesn't matter that it gets a lower IPC or is less efficient!!!!! The point is that it has a higher overall throughput because it can run at 2+ Ghz in an aluminum .18 process! Wait till it gets copper, SOI and drops to .13.
.75 (like you argue, AMD is more efficient). Now assume that they are both manufactured in roughly the same process and the P4 can only scale to 2ghz and the AMD maxes out at 1.4ghz (actually they can probably go higher). Therefore the P4 cranks out 1.5 (2*.75) billion operations per second while the AMD can only crank out 1.4 (1.4*1) billion operations per second. Now for grins lets throw the P3 in there.. Lets say it gets an IPC of .95 and maxes out at 1 ghz. Its max throughput is .95 billion operations per second. Which CPU should Intel focus on? Efficiency isn't the name of the game right now, if it was, we would all be running 400 mhz 486's that consume .001 watts.
Ok, since I may not have made myself clear! Lets make up an example. Assume: that the AMD gets a normalized IPC of 1 and the P4 gets a IPC of
As far as the FPU is concerned I believe Intel made the right decision. They control the majority of the x86 market and when they make a move people follow. They obviously decided (like AMD has for the Hammer) that high performance FP that isn't compatible with the x87 is more important than mediocre x87 performance. The x87 has turned out to be a beast to optimize because it is a stack based arch. The problem with stack based FP units is that they cannot be truly superscaler. This is why the 'RISC' arch's usually beat the x86 on floating point benchmarks. Its really hard to parallize FP operations when they are all dependent on the TOS from the last operation. So, Intel's engineers made the decision to focus on SSE, assuming that people who truly cared about top of the line floating point performance would recompile their code to use SSE, those people who didn't care would continue to use the old x87 FP. The people using SSE will see a nice performace boost while the people using the x87 will see modest boosts due primarly to the increased clock rates of the new processor. This is how Intel manages to make competitive CPU's (other companies do it too), they figure out a way to make the CPU scream and maintain compatibility with older CPU's at a relatively somewhat lower performance. This is old news, its a rehash of the same discussion when the Ppro came out. Everyone bitched about how much slower it was running 16 bit code. Do you think Intel made the wrong decision releasing the P6 core? That wasn't the first time the discussion came up either. I remember the 286 vs 386 discussions where the 286 was faster doing PIO at similar clock rates. We don't seem to care about that one anymore either.
I'd be firing my entire marketing team. Because they aren't doing a damn thing to market their products on a level basis. The Mhz problem they face, makes for a lot of Intel sales, so one good concieve how they came up with such an idea. In the end, the general public wants a good product, what they've heard to do, is to look for the highest Mhz number they can afford, and voila you won't have to upgrade in a year. Those of us who spend countless hours researching this junk know, but I highly doubt we make up 1% of the population. Imagine what a salesman has to tell a customer when they ask for the Mhz rating. "Well, we can't really tell you, ok, well it's not really a 1600Mhz process, it's actually a 1400Mhz, but the AMD is still as good as the higher Intel processor." If I had no clue about computers, I'd be thinking the salesperson had no clue what they were talking about, and trying to make some quota. Bamn, another Intel purchase. What AMD needs is to spend their marketing dollars on cheesy, cute TV ads to finally end the Mhz race. I'd personally use the soggy bottom boys...