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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 =("
...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
Which is the marketing scheme? The faster MHz? Or the better chip????
The faster MHz. Even people who ought to know better are looking at AMD's move as a "dirty trick" (*ahem*). But faster MHz, even though it's pretty much a pure marketing move, makes news headlines, and even those who know better are tempted to say, "Gee, still, 2GHz is really fast" even though its speed is comparable to a 1.4GHz Athlon4.
When people call your marketing strategy a marketing strategy, and even more when they call it a "dirty trick" (*ahem*), then you're not doing as good of a job at marketing as your competitor whose marketing strategy is difficult for people to recognize as such.
This isn't really a dirty marketing trick, so much as an approach to weening the consumer from their reliance on clock speeds as a measure of performance. Granted it would be better handled by insuring that reliable and impartial benchmarks such as perdormed by AnandTech or Tom'sHardware got the appropriate amount of press, rather than being pushed out of the spotlight by clock speeds. They could have tried to get the consumer to rely of FOPS or some other measure of performance, but if they completely refuse to disclose the clock speeds of their chips, that is entirely another problem. The trick will be to insure that there are a sufficient number of impartial benchmarks out there for consumers to feel confident about the numbers they provide.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
On the one hand, as has been pointed out a dozen times, MHz is a pointless number. It's like talking about engines in terms of liters. Higher numbers are not always better than lower numbers.
More importantly, CPU speed has stopped being an issue for most people. I know, I know, there are always some people who love to claim to be the exception to the rule, people who insist they need to solve systems of fifty million linear equations or that they do aircraft design at home, but for most people, even professional programmers, speed has gone beyond what we know what to do with. When the 333MHz Pentium II rolled around, I started coding in the highest level language I could find, be it Lisp or Smalltalk, because what I then saw as excessive performance afforded me the luxury. Now we have processors that are five times faster, and I don't think about speed at the hardware level.
Slowness is usually something that's outside of the realm of hundreds of millions of operations per second. For example, Internet Explorer takes too long to start up on my machine. Lots of people apparently think that a faster processor would fix that. And other people complain that a game is stuttery, and think they need more CPU performance, when half of the time it comes down to a buggy video driver.
The problem being that horsepower is a measure of output power, not internal engine conditions. You can compare the horsepower between two very different engines and it still means something. The clock speed of the chip is more like the number of RPMs a clock does. Say you have the engines from a Viper and a Neon. For arguments sake lets say the redline for both vehicles is 5000 RPMs. Which engine would you rather have?
The chip speed battle is similar. A 1.4 GhZ Athalon and a 1.4 GhZ PentiumIV both run at the same internal speed. The Athalon can do more every clock cycle though. The problem is educating the public about this. The public has been conditioned to care about clock cycles, not how many instructions per second the system can process, or even better, the throughput of the system handling real world tasks.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
Sure, that makes sense, but only if they're not being misleading.
By using numbers that look suspiciously like MHz numbers they are being very very dirty and should go sit in the corner. If they had called it MODEL T, for example, then your argument would hold water. Forcing computer manufacturers to not be able to display the MHz rating just prooves that's exactly what they're trying to do: be dirty and hide the numbers.
And besides, when a TBird 1.2 is 1/2 the price of a P4 1.4, are they really in that much of a loosing spot?
Mind you, DDR did the same trick with their PC1600 and PC2100 memory, to not "sound" slower than RDRAM...
If God gave us curiosity
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).
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?
This whole processor coverup thing started with Intel and their "Pentium" series
Woahhh.... That wasn't done to hide performance, that was done to copyright the name of their processors because apparently 486 isn't copyrightable, so in the public's mind a 486-100Mhz is obviously better than a 486-66MHz because they're the same name, right?
Intel only stuck with the Pentium naming scheme because they put so much damned money into advertising (which AMD has yet to do), and that's what got the public on their side.
AMD just needs to get a good marketing team to whip up a lot of good advertising and put it everywhere. Those "dumb" people that everyone here is so fond of referring to only think that P4 is better and that the MHz counts because they haven't been told otherwise.
If God gave us curiosity
That is part of AMD's problem. When a consumer sees that the AMD part is "1.2" and the Intel part is "2.0" AND the AMD part is cheaper, they assume it is cheaper because it is slower. This is not the case (as far as I have seen), but the big chipmakers don't really care what John Q. Nerd thinks, they care what John Q. Public thinks. There are more regular consumers than nerds, on an order of several magnitudes. Intel makes more money on each processor. They have higher margins than AMD, because they are not just selling a proc, they are selling a brand. AMD is just selling a proc. They have made quite a bit of market share since the introduction of the Athlon, not because it had good architecture and was a solid chip, but because they were competitive in Mhz. Now that they are not competitive in Mhz (but still very competitive in performance) they are running scared. John Q. Public does not care how many instructions the Athlon can execute in a clock cycle, he doesn't even know what an instruction is and wouldn't care if you told him. He knows what a Mhz is. That is what computers are sold on. I think AMD is waaaay off the mark here, but I certainly understand the reason they are doing it. What they should do is follow Intel's lead and produce a fantastically overclockable CPU by increasing the length of the pipeline. I don't know how much it is going to matter, hopefully there will be 64-bit chips on the market soon and the stupid Mhz race can start all over again.
Enigma