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 =("
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.
Higher Octane IS better.
No, It's not "better", it's "different".
Higher octane means (IIRC) the gas has a higher ignition point, so it won't "knock"(pre-ignite) in high compression [high performance] engines.
"Knock" will reduce performance, and will eventually damage your engine.
In your average car, putting in high octane has absolutely no benefit, except maybe to give you a good feeling that you're putting "premium" gas in it.
Bottom line: use what your manual tells you to use. Don't try to outsmart the people that designed your engine.
C-X C-S
Your posting, while well thought-out, is technically nonsense.
I write this as a person with a bachelors in Computer Engineering who is currently completing masters in EE.
First of all, the waveform in question is a square wave, not a sine wave. So I don't see how pi comes into...well, anything. You go though some basic trig to prove that f=c/L (frequency=speed of light divided by wavelength). So what?
Some architecture triggers on the rising edge, some on the falling. It does not really matter.
The rumor you heard about Intel architecture "counting" both rising and falling edges is silly; what counts is the number of pulses, not the number of rising and falling edges.
Now, there may be a basis to that rumor in that some architectures where the CPU runs at a multiple of the bus speed and triggers on both the rising and falling edges. The older Athlons, for example, run at a 200Mhz clock speed. But the external CPU bus runs at a 100Mhz clock speed.
Does this mean that AMD is cheating? That they are "claiming" 200Mhz when it is only 100Mhz?
No. What it means is that the Athlon triggers on the rising edge, then half-a-period-later it triggers again on the falling edge. Assuming that the Athlon triggers on a rising edge, this could be accomplished by inverting the clock, and ORing the signals together (although it is not that simple, you get the idea). So for each external 100Mhz clock pulse, the CPU fires two internal clock pulses. And the speed is doubled. So your 1Ghz Athlon runs externally at 100Mhz with a 5x multiplier. Inside it runs at 200Mhz with a 5x multiplier. 200x5=1000. See?
And since you trigger every half-period, you cut the time of the period in half. f=1/T, where f is frequency and T is period. So when you cut the period in half, you double the frequency.
That is why the new 266Mhz FSB Athlon chips need to have the external clock speed set at 133.
So why not just run the PC board at 200Mhz and forget all this silly clock-doubling hardware? It is not that easy. Desinging a glass-epoxy PC board to work at 100Mhz is hard; 200Mhz even harder. As you go higher in speed, harmonics in the microwave regions begin to creep in and most digital designers are not ready for that sort of variable. Plus, it raises the cost of everything in the PC. Remember that your PCI ports still run at 33Mhz on most machines....
Okay, so why is the Mac faster at the operations you used in your tests? It's a different architecture! You are comparing apples (pardon the pun) to grapefruit here. It's like saying that if a 10-cylinder diesel truck is at 4000RPM and a 2-cylinder moped is at 4000RPM, they should be going the same speed.
How many CPU cycles does each operation take on the G4? How many CPU cycles do those same operations take on the Intel? What about differences due to setup and OS lag? Is the compiler optimized for the CPU? If so, is it using out-of-order execution? That is the sort of thing you need to know for a test like this. The same operation may take 10 cycles on the Intel and 1 on the G4. So, for that operation, the G4 would be ten times faster. If an operation takes one cycle on both machines, the Intel would be twice as fast as it has twice as many cycles per second. Cycles Per Second, or CPS, is also known as Hz. And the Intel chip is running at twice the clock rate as the G4. Trust me. What it is not running at is twice the speed, since operations on the two machines take different numbers of clock cycles to complete.
so much as an approach to weening the consumer from their reliance on clock speeds as a measure of performance
You know, in a couple years clock speeds will be so high that that they will be largely irrelevant for most PC purchasers. Except for a very small group of users, neither the Mhz or the benchmarks will really matter all that much. At that point the chip specs become a footnote in the manual.
Look at the current situation -- AMD has a very fast 1.4Ghz chip that they apparently have to almost give away at $100 or so a unit. Long gone are the days when Intel could release a chip that was 10% faster and demand twice as much money for it. A 2 Ghz chip comes out, and it's being sold at Walmart, not as a $8000 workstation. Mhz is no longer moving product.
The OEMs have been primarily relying on Intel and AMD to 'add value' by routinely upping clockspeeds. The result is a commodity low-margin business where the CPU guys make all the profits. They've got a couple years to try to figure out another way to squeeze blood out of a turnip (like Apple did with style and video apps, for example), and then it's all over.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Probably a better analogy is Engine RPM to Processor Clock Speed. RPM x Torque = Horsepower, in the same way the Clock Speed x Instruction per Cycle = Throughput.
You can have a really low torque car, as long as it can Rev high (Acura), or you could just build a low RPM car, as long as it's got a lot of torque (Chevy). Same thing in the end.
When rendering graphics, you can get a 2GHz CPU Pentium that runs 2 flops per cycle, resulting to 4 GFlops of throughput, or you can use a 250MHz ATI Radeon 8500, which probably gets 100 flops per cycle, resulting in 25GFlops.
CPU Speed matters, but it should also be used in context of instructions per cycle. Maybe AMD should just assign a MIPS or FLOPS rating, rather than just MHz. I would find this measurement more useful. This would be equivalent to Chevy advertising Horsepower for their Vette (low RPM, but High Torque) You don't see them advertise their RPM?