1.3GHz Duron Arrives

zebadee writes: "Tom's Hardware has the news that AMD have released a 1.3GHz Duron to the "mainstream PC market" that has been optimised for use with WindowsXP. The article also asks 'why haven't AMD gone with the MHz doesn't equal performance as they have done with the new XP/MP chips, as it would be assumed the market for these will be consumers who don't generally look at benchmark figures?' More information can be found at the AMD website."

Comments

What?!

[ender-iii]

Shouldn't the OS be optimised for the hardware? Not the hardware comprimised for the OS?

Re:I *like* MHz

[SirSlud]

And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz

As an enthusiast, you should be able to find the MHz rating of your chip. Hrm, lets see .. on the 'net, on the box, in your BIOS. As an enthusiast, you arn't losing anything in their naming scheme. Are car enthusiasts fsck'd because the horse power rating of engines isn't included in the name of the model of the car?

As an enthusiast, you should know how little the MHz rating has to do with the actual performance of the chip with respect to cross-brand comparisons. Joe Consumer still clings to Intel's carrot (Mhz = performance), so AMD is just trying to give everyone a dose of reality. I think it's funny how people feel that they're being mislead, when really, the clock stat is just being moved to 'specs' page of the chip .. it's removal from the name is simply so that Joe Consumer can't keep saying, "The latest P4 runs at Y Ghz, and the latest AMD runs at (Y - X) Ghz, so I'd better buy the Intel." Whether the strategy pays off in the long run (and I think it will, as the clock rating becomes more and more meaningless when discussing home/office computing) is not clear yet, but they are doing you and your friends more of a favour than a disservice.

Problem with getting away from MHZ system

[ImaLamer]

Yes another one of these posts, it has nothing to do with the hardware!

But does anyone here but me want to question 'Benchmarks' instead of Mhz? I mean the CPU does run at said Mhz, that hasn't changed.

The problem is, when I see a chart comparing two companies chips, I can't believe it. I want to look for the footnote that says their system was tested with 93749234 GB of RAM, while the other companies was only tested with 1 MB of RAM.

That is why they should just give the CPU a name, or number, or whatever and let use read these reviews. Although sometimes reviews can also be biased, I can't trust anything that comes right from the company.

I used to have a chart showing how an AMD chip was like 50% faster than a Pentium of the same clock speed. This bothered me to no end. [it could be the other way around, that isn't important. What is: I didn't trust it.]

It's like a detergent commercial by 'Tide' which shows you two shirts and it cleans the whole stain while 'Era' doesn't. Just seems faked.

The cynical answer:

[Christopher Thomas]

why haven't AMD gone with the MHz doesn't equal performance as they have done with the new XP/MP chips, as it would be assumed the market for these will be consumers who don't generally look at benchmark figures?

My guess: Because they don't want to compete with *themselves*.

If a consumer sees a Duron rated to "1.3 GHz" (1300 MHz), and an Athlon XYZ rated to "1600 FooUnits", which will they want?

Right.

The fact that Celeron clock numbers are no better than Duron numbers is icing on the cake.

Re:Duron will eventually use Marketing Ploy

[90XDoubleSide]

Apple's "Photoshop tests" are getting a lot more relevant now that all the power-hungry apps are optimized, however. Maya, FCP3, Photoshop, Filemaker, CodeWarrior, and iTunes are AltiVec, and Quake3 is getting more and more optimized code every day. Those are all the apps you are likely to have using 100% of your CPU anyway. With all these apps optimized and a $1299 Mac running at almost 4 GigaFlops, I don't think you can downplay AltiVec anymore.