Slashdot Mirror
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."
Shouldn't the OS be optimised for the hardware? Not the hardware comprimised for the OS?
ender-iii
Maybe AMD calls their Durons by their MHz value because they feel the performance numbers are reflected in the clock frequency. If the Duron at 1.3GHz runs as well as a Celeron at 1.3GHz then, they'd, in theory, call the Duron a "1300+" Duron, even though that's the same number as the clock frequency.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe AMD is honest about their intentions with this numbering system?
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
Does anyone have info on this?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... this guy's logic?
I know I haven't griped about this in a while, but if AMD switched to its new "MHz doesn't equal performance" naming scheme for its higher end Athlons (where one would assume that the users probably look at benchmarks) why is it sticking with GHz for "mainstream PC" chips (where you would imagine that users are less likely to look at benchmarks)?
Well, the reason they're naming their mainstream processors by clock rate is precisely because the users are less likely to look at benchmarks. The effect the clock rate has on the overall speed of a computer is minimal, but if you ask the everyday person, even your average best buy or gateway store worker, they'll tell you that high clock = fast. So, if you want people who don't know anything about benchmarks to buy your chip, just say it's got a high clock rate, and they'll think it's fast.
~ now you know
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?
Because the Duron competes against the P3-based Celeron, not the P4 that runs far slower clock-to-clock than its predecessor. If Intel hadn't deliberately designed the P4 for clock speed at the expense of performence, AMD would not have needed their True Performence Initiative.
In this case, two wrongs DO make a right. At least AMD's "wrong" is just marketing fluff rather than deliberately misdesigned engineering.
Athlon's are being marketed against the PIV's however, and the PIV's have changed their architecture significantly. This has the effect of the PIV actually being slower at equivalent clock speeds. A PIII 2GHz would be faster, for most apps, than a PIV 2GHz. To counter this unfair MHz advantage, AMD came up with their PR numbers to show that Athlon XP's perfrom equivently to a higher rated PIV. Of course, once software is programmed to take advantage of the PIV's new architecture (rememebr when Pentium Pro's hit the scene?), I wonder if AMD will push those XP ratings down. =)
And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz
Why?
If a 1.6 GHz (AMD) chip is faster than a 2.0 GHz (Intel) chip, then this seems to be a singularly useless number... if only had any meaning when the two companies had more similar architectures where the MHz figures were at least roughly comparable.
Note, incidently that the original speed measure was MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second), but this was not MIPS of the CPU/computer in question, but rather MIPS normalized to a VAX 780 having 1 MIPS.
How on earth we got to the point that people started to measure speed by MHz is beyond me. For the previous generation x86 CPUS it was admittedly semi-reasonable, but across architectures it was always useless.... Have you ever checked the clock speeds of the top SPECINT scores...
The Athlon, of course, is competing with the Pentioum 4 and is able to keep performance pace, but not clock pace. In that market clock speed causes confusion about actual performance, so the performance rating makes sense there.
That's my best guess as to why they don't use the performance rating system on Durons.
It could also be that AMD has no problem saying that the Duron achieves performance and clock parity with the Pentium 4. I haven't seen any benchmark comparisons between the Pentium 4 and the Duron, nor have I looked for them, but I have no problem believing that a 1.3GHz Duron qualifies for a 1300+ rating, or even a 1500+ rating. Giving it that rating, however, would place it in direct competition with hte Athlon. That maybe seems a little underhanded, but ask yourself what's more underhanded: limiting competition between your high- and low-end products through naming convention, or limiting it by intentionally crippling the low-end product?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
And as an enthusiast, I like knowing the actual MHz
.. 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?
.. 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.
As an enthusiast, you should be able to find the MHz rating of your chip. Hrm, lets see
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
"Old man yells at systemd"
I've got a Best Buy ad here for three Compaq computers. In the "Processor" line of the table it says: "Intel Celeron 1.3GHz", "Athlon XP 1700+ QuantiSpeed Architecture operates at 1.47GHz", and "Pentium 4 1.8GHz".
It clearly and openly states, in print as big as the Celeron GHz number, the Athlon QuantiSpeed number, and the Pentium 4 GHz, the actual GHz rating of the Athlon chip.
How is that not telling as it is?
Especially now, since the price of the XP processors are ever increasing. For less than $150 I can get a Duron 1200 and a very capable companion motherboard, the ECS K7S5A. For $65 after shipping from Newegg.com (No, I have no vested interests in Newegg, I just like their customer support and shipping), you get a solid performing, stable, compatable motherboard with built in Sound and Lan. Nothing to scoff at. It even has overclockability using such programs as CPUFSB. The Durons are a great family, I think I may go ahead and get one now :)
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.
Get your Unix fortune now!
do you optimize a chip for an operating system, anyway?
You profile it and then make the commonly used code paths go faster.
What probably actually happened is that AMD profiled a bunch of code and used it to optimize their CPU. since XP probably has similar code paths, you just don't mention that it's also optimized for the bulk of x86 code
Reboot macht Frei.
Tom's Hardware has a nice review and comparison of the athlon 1300 vs. the Celeron 1300.
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.
One day, the makers of a processor for a particular computer system decided to be developers for a day, and do some profiling. They found a particular sequence of several instructions that was being executed quite often, and they figured they could speed up the entire system by adding an instruction to the CPU that carried out that particular operation in fewer clock cycles.
They did their redesign, and tested the new system. There was no speedup.
They had optimized the operating system's idle loop.
I do not get it. Why slashdot all of sudden interested in AMD (or Intel) chips that they crank out every month or so with new Hz and nothing new inside? Just to get "imagine beowulf claster of clasters of these"? Is it "stuff that matters"?
:) ?
Beside tomshardware there are a lot more sites with nice covering of whatever you want (http://xbit-labs.com for example).
Yeah, right, toms is heavy loaded with ads (I think I never saw any site that has more per page ads), so may be slashdot decided to have 10% of revenue from it for just redirecting bunch of "cool folks"
Couple years ago slashdot was much more "ahead of time", I used to find "things" there first, and after couple days notice same references or articles on other sites. Now it is opposite -- you find cool thing, and completely not sure if you will ever see discussion of this on slashdot (slashdot is famous for comments, not for articles).
If 2 years is "lifetime" of modern PC, and you upgrade it, may be it is a time for slashers to upgrade to something cool or at least to be up to date? It is not a MTV, it should get better year to year...
tandr.
These Durons are based on the Morgan core, which for all intents and purposes is the same as the Athlon XP processors, but /w less cache. This means you get SSE & instruction pre-fetch, like the XP, as well as lower power dissipation.
The T-Birds are based on an older core that didn't have those enhancements, but did have more L2.
So basically, given an equal clock speed, the rankings of the processors would be:
Old Duron -> Athlon T-Bird -> New Duron (this article) -> Athlon XP
The caveat is that in certain apps where L2 is the deciding factor, the T-Bird might be faster, but as a general rule, the core enhancements of the newer Durons (and XPs) outweigh the larger L2.
"Optimized for Windows XP" has little to do with the performance and/or features of the chip. It has more to do with the "standard" PC that Microsoft and Intel require you to have to get the "Designed for..." logos on your computer system.
The PC Design Checklist has a set of requirements that your hardware must meet in order to be certified for use with Windows XP. Basically, if you're a system manufacturer and want to pre-install Windows, you must follow these guidelines and use only parts that also meet the guidelines. AMD certified their products with Microsoft so that OEMs would be able to include them in PCs that have Windows pre-installed.
Microsoft and Intel come out with new requirements every year for PCs to get the latest "Designed for..." label and to preinstall Windows. Some of the latest requirements are that PCs are not allowed to have ISA devices and that the PC must be at the desktop/login stage no more than 35 seconds after the power button is pressed. (See the link I posted above for full details.)
It's not a conspiracy by Microsoft and Intel, or anything of that sort. It's the same thing that a lot of manufacturers go through to say that their products are "certified" for such-and-such uses. Note that you, as a PC manufacturer, are free to not certify your computer with Microsoft, but you lose the OEM discounts on Windows preinstalls if you do, and you lose the free advertising provided by Microsoft.
This, overall, is a Good Thing -- otherwise, cheap manufacturers might still be trying to force-feed us ISA devices and no USB ports.
I can sympathise with that guy though. I read the entire thread, and while he comes off badly, he has a valid point.
It's like;
"my USB cable modem doesn't work under XP. It works under 2000, NT, 98, 95, and ME."
"You should buy another USB port."
"but it's not a hardware problem. It works under every other MS OS."
"You should buy a new USB cable modem."
"But it's not hardware, it's XP. I've established that."
"Try the drivers. Probably never worked under XP."
"But Microsoft Certified them. They've tested the drivers, and the drivers worked, according to them."
"Yeah, probably the drivers."
"But it's not. The fact that the modem works under 2000 proves it. Besides, if it didn't work, and MS certified it, then MS is at fault anyway..."
"You're being blind here. It's the drivers."
"Listen, fucknut, it can't be the drivers. It can't be the hardware. It must be XP. I'm asking for suggestions on how I could get XP to work with my cable modem."
"You're being blind, retard, it's obviously the drivers! Sometimes manufacturers fuck up. Get over it."
"That's it. This conversation is over. I just returned XP and am using 98 again."
Interesting read(and quite humorous), since everybody else came off as calm, but the fact remains, the process of elimination did point to XP, and everybody kept on insisting that he should run out and buy more hardware.
I also understand why he was pissed off though. He went out and paid 200 bucks for XP, and it didn't work as advertised. The fact that people blamed his hardware for some reason only made the situation worse.
It's been a long time.
It may not be where you heard the story, but it is on page 177 of "The Practice of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike.
'why haven't AMD gone with the MHz doesn't equal performance as they have done with the new XP/MP chips
Because it's deceptive marketing. I'm an AMD user myself (TBird 1.2 GHz), but it really annoys me that they would be willing to mark a processor as something that it is not. Please don't try to tell me that 'performance rating...blah blah...equivalent speed in old architecture.' They are marking the new processors as speeds that they do not run at, period.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith