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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 =("
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!
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....
...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
>>We do not buy cars based entirely on how many RPMs they are capable of.
No, but horsepowers do influence our decision. Much less, though, because the cars are not named 'Integra 180hp' and 'M3 340hp', while the CPUs *are* named 'Athlon 1.4GHz', 'P4 1.6GHz'.
So, it's a good marketing decision, to make up model names/numbers for different CPUs. As for hiding the actual clock frequency -- for the people who care to find out, it can't possibly be a big problem to figure it out.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
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?
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
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
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!
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