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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
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.
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.
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.