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Intel "Northwood" vs. Athlon XP 2000+
Augustus writes: "LinuxHardware.org has just published their results in the Pentium 4 verses Athlon XP war. In this review, the new Pentium 4 'Northwood' 2.2GHz is pitted against the Athlon XP 2000+. To level the playing field, both platforms use DDR memory which make for some interesting results."
I am running Linux on Dual Athlon XPs. Does that make it Linux XP?
~.Evanrude
We need better testing. You can not (really)
expect the same test to give you a good judgement, and then on the other hand, having different test for each CPU would obviously not give you a good judgement... Hmm, perhaps some speed testing on regular apps. I know they do that on quake and the like, but then that was written for a specific architecture also. Just a thought.
and 5 seconds later, linuxhardware.com gets slashdotted. Does anyone know of another place I can find a simmilar conparison? I'm interested to know how it plays out.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps they should have used the test machines to host their website...
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
P4 was designed with Rambus ram in mind.
.13 Athlons, hopefully it will work out ok.
They should really use Intel's i850 motherboard to pit against the Athlon.
The p4 platform is simply not designed for DDR in mind, adding DDR in the i84x boards are afterthoughts and IMO I would much rather use Intel boards with Intel processors.
Athlon is doing quite well right now, seems like there might be a delay for the
kawai
Wouldn't it be more of a level playing field if both processors were allowed to use their optimum RAM types? Sure, keep the rest of the system honest, but don't handicap one processor by forcing it to use a RAM type it wasn't initially designed for.
how when an article is posted on /., the site hosting the article gets overloaded and can't serve up what we're looking for. Perhaps /. can warn sites that they're gonna link to them?
Why the hell does using DDR memory even the results? The Pentium 4 was designed for RDRAM for God's sake. A DDR platform for the P4 is just an economy decision.
To make things really even, you could take a hammer and drive the P4 into a socket A Motherboard. Then you could really compare them, couldn't you? Perfectly even field.
The reason DDR was used is because there have been COUNTLESS tests done with RAMBUS.
The whole goal was to see how well it'd do with DDR now that it supports it.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
As linuxhardware. I'd love to see if my little box could take it. Whatcha gonna do?
What, me worry?
Take a look at
d ex .html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/in
They posted the results of their showdown 2weeks ago.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Site is slashdotted, as most things are when posted in /., at least the first few hours/days.
Why doesn't slashdot mirror sites is link to? Legal issues, I guess? I also guess that many people has suggested this before....
Anyway, IMHO it would be great, but the usual copyright laws/junk get in the way...
What about putting a screenshot of a site? Would that get into copyright problems? I guess too... it was AMAZING to read about this college professor (I believe) showing ways to put the CSS decryption source code in all the formats imaginable, and then talking about it in court hearings as an expert. This issues are not simple, indeed.
Anandtech match up
Interesting at least.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I would check the website so I know what I'm talking about when I comment. But since I can't access the site due to the (I assume) brutal slashdotting, I feel almost compelled to comment without any supporting information to base my wildly inaccurate opinions on. If at least the article summary had summarized (probably incorrectly) the article content beyond saying it was "interesting" then at least we could get the debate rolling, at least until the page became accessible again. At which time, everyone else would join the fray complaining that nobody reads the articles.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
My god, and I thought @Home internet service was bad!
I have been using the 2.0 on asus p4b with the geforce 3 card. The results are pretty awe inspiring....I am just glad that I do not have to buy rambus
Athlon XP? Xp from Windows XP - the 1st chip sponsored by Microsoft!!! Brilhant!!!
:-))
Intel should be changing is chip's name to Redmond.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
I don't think so, however there are other benchmarks here.
Reminder: find a new sig
related?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
... they're not really levelling the playing field because DDR memory is a mature option for AMD whereas it's brand new on the Intel boards, and apparently has some problems.
If you're going to compare just CPU power then use synthetic benchmarks that test just that, otherwise if it's system performance you're going after why not compare AMD DDR to Pentium 4 RDRAM, at least those are two mature configurations.
The P4 wasn't designed for any particular memory - but the initial chipsets designed for it were. Newer chipsets now existt hat are designed for DDR rather than RDRAM, and that's what matters for memory format (besides, try to switch the two and THEN see what happens!).
SIG: HUP
the Intel vs. Athlon war... "Breaking news from the front today. The armies of Athlon continue to push against the Intel positions. However, Intel's unique 'chime' technology his inspired their troops to hold the line..."
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
apply the AMD no Large Page Table processor bug patch?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't see why hardware sites insist on seeing which chip "is fastest." I'd be more interested in an acceptable price/performance ratio. The Athlon XP 2000+ (which can still hold its own fairly well against a P4 2200) costs LESS THAN HALF of a P4 2200. Why anyone would spend the extra $350 on a P4 for the minimal performance gains (relative to the cost) is beyond me. And for those who want absolute, unforgiving, raw performance.. For the same price as a P4 2200 with a decent motherboard, you can buy a Tyan Tiger MP with a pair of Athlon XP 2000s and a bunch of DDR memory (AMD reccomends you use Athlon MPs but there's no reason the XPs won't work.) Sure, graphs and kernel compile times are pretty and all, but eventually you have to think about what is practical..
Given that the P4 costs more than twice as much as the Athlon ($548 versus $263 on PriceWatch), why would they bother with only DDR? Just by including the P4 they've pretty much thrown price/performance ratios out the window anyway.
A better question to ask of the P4 might be whether it could beat the Athlon with any kind of memory, and if so, by how much?
Just killing time while my program compiles and the site becomes available again.
Read the damn faq once and shut the hell up. I see this quesion so many damn times. This is EXACTLY what the fact says: Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
With processing power up at the level it is today, how much of a difference in these two chips' performances is really notable? Even if the Athlon "XP" outperformed the intel (as I am told is often), it probably wouldn't be much, at least not enough worth talking about, and it sure wouldn't negate the fact that there have been several AMD "bugs" which notably inflict Linux users. They are, however, much cheaper. So I guess for me, the comparison isn't "price/performance", it's "price/functionality". Just my .02
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1574
Doesnt google cache site's also ? dont they get in trouble then ?
Quazion.
Page3.com. Well, its not about the processors, but it is about a pair of things.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Athlon XP: Awsome.
Northwood core: Even better.
looks like there linuxhardware isnt good enough to serv a web site...
We're not even up to 100 comments, and the site's been Slashdotted.. Anyone have a copy of the results? I'd love to see if the Athlon kicked the Pentium 4 into the ground..
~RaGe
www.outrigged.com
Many P IV people seem to be leaping over to DDR and going gonzo over it lately.
Level or not, I'm happy someone did a comparison with the P IV using DDR.
You KNEW the site would get slashdotted, so there was NO reason to post a quick summary in the followup about the test results. Instead we've got people sitting here wondering whats up, and probably a lot of angry people over at linuxworld.com or where ever. Very POOR judgement.
It's nice to see a review that is NOT by tom's hardware on slashdot... nice to see a little variation in the works
...the Pentium 4 verses Athlon XP war...
'Pentium 4 verses'? Are they anything like Spam Poetry?
It's 'versus', Mr. Editor Sir.
They all work faster than my P-150. They're all fast.
Perhaps some of the staff from linuxhardware.org saw the post and realized that they were about to get slashdotted and pulled the plug in time.
Any mirrors?
'Northwood' or not, there is no way that the P4 can outperform the Athlon XP.
I do not believe for a second that the addition of DDR ram to the P4 system increases Quake 3 framerates by 10% or more compared to the Athlon XP. that the P4 outperforms the G4 and Athlon XP Photoshop benchmarks
These guys are obviously not Tom's Hardware.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Not entirely true. Although at first the only motherboards you could get for the Pentium 4 supported only RDRAM, but now Intel has released chipsets that support DDR RAM as well. You can check out the chipsets on Intel's website: the 850 chipset supports RDRAM, and the 845 chipset supports DDR RAM and PC133 RAM.
As usual, a lower MHz rating on an Athlon easily competes with the higher MHz on a Pentium. Maybe if Intel starts renaming their processers, starting with maybe the 1800- and 2000- series.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
They should even things out even better and keep those power-guzzling volcano fans away from the Athlons. Then you can compare both in environments they weren't designed for :)
-Wrexsoul
--- Need web hosting?
Overly complicated? I suppose for the slow it might be, but it seems incredibly simple to me. a) Set price point(s) b) Determine the purpose (Linux workstation, gaming, Office benchmarks, etc.) c) Develop a benchmark plan. d) Use your credibility as a hardware guru site to pick the best hardware that fits within each price point, for the applicable systems, and for the task set out. Document your choices so that critics (which there always are) can bitch that you didn't use the KT266a motherboard, etc. Earn your keep as a hardware site by making good choices. e) Benchmark. The reality (and home users) is that businesses don't say "I need a computer to do workstation tasks and I'm paying $1300 if it's an AMD system and $1600 if it's an Intel system!" : They buy based upon what they need to do, and the budget they have, and the performance that they get at that budget, otherwise there'd be a lot more options than just AMD and Intel there. Where's the IBM mini-computer options?
Based on the title, Tom's Hardware have a very similar review.
No bandwidth problems here.
When posting about hardware comparisons please summarize the results in the front page post. Most of us don't care about the little details. Just say AMD won, Intel won or tie. Then I won't have to go reading through the 20 pages of tests.
Here comes the "offtopic" moderation...
/. effect can now be classified as a DoS attack.
/. is Anti-Microsoft, Anti-Intel, Anti-any-sort-of-establishment.
I tried to access the site but could not. The
From the posts below I have extrapolated that
I mean, the points are valid. But doesn't anyone care that Intel has proved their chips are far more reliable under heat-emergencies than the AMD CPUs?
Yes, the Palomino has improved on this but it's like buying a car. Sure a Porshe Boxster is fast, and costs a fraction of the 911. But which car is a proven vehicle?
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
Followed your sig's link, and wow. Nice streaming server. You should consider getting it listed at VersionTracker. I spent a good day looking for a decent mp3 streamer that would run on OSX. After giving up in frustration, I ran across your link, and was saved.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
How do the next few months look in terms of the ability of either Intel or AMD to improve upon these products?
While I'm a fan of AMD's price/performance ratios, it looks as if they will be hard pressed to keep increasing the clock on the Athlon, while the Pentium 4 seems to have a lot more potential for higher clock rates.
Then, too, I'm wondering about the news reports that suggest that Athlons won't be paired up with the new DDR 333 MHz memory.
It may mean that the highest performance x86 architecture this summer will be from Intel and will be able to command more of a premium in price than if AMD were breathing down their necks, which has been the case over the past year and a half.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Did you do it? How well does it work? I was thinking of doing the same thing, but thought better of it since it would be a major fn() hassle if it didn't work out.
wax on, wax off
why is it that linuxhardware.com is unaccessable right now? did the server crash? or is its perl script too busy rebuilding the page every time it is requested. web sites need to start caching more! use a apache http accel cache.. anything!
Think about that.
Ten nodes with $300 Athlon 2000+ and $1500 Gb NIC = $18,000.
Nine nodes with $600 P4 2.2 GHz and $1500 Gb NIC = $18,900.
Where is that savings?
A comparison of the two top products from AMD and Intel reveals the astonishing: although the processors are as different from one another as apples and oranges, the difference is much less obvious in the benchmark results, when taken from an absolute standpoint.
In any case, one thing is visible: in the majority of performance tests, the new Pentium 4/2200 is ahead. After all, the top AMD processor has to make do with 1666 MHz, while its archenemy steps in with 2200 MHz. A closer look at the comprehensive benchmarks reveals that in Office performance as well as Linux Kernel compiling, the Athlon XP still takes the lead, despite its 32% clock speed disadvantage!
Hello, the fastest MP processor is 4% slower (1600 compared to 1667MHz), probably due to the extra stability they want there as the server marked will drop anything unstable faster than lightning. Stick with the facts (they're expensive and don't add any real value add-on beyond certification) and don't FUD.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While reading through the results an idea came to me. Is it possible that the reason the P4 generally does better on 'one algorithm type of tasks is because its long pipeline wouldn't get busted as much, meaning that the branch prediction worked, which is based of past branch statistics (right?).
This makes since to me actually, in speaking with my friend about this last night I was asked 'well, what do you need a fast CPU for, when does it matter?', I replied 'Well, games, anything to do with multimedia, like Photoshop effects, ray tracing, mpeg encoding, but ya for general use, the CPU doesn't as much'.
but wait, lets look at that list in how it relates to the pipeline idea:
games: probably a good deal is going on here, AI, 3d pipelines, IO, networking probably not something a branch predictor would excel at
Photoshop effects ray tracing, mpeg encoding: all relatively contained algorithm that (if I'm right) would work well with the brand prediction.
So actually maybe having such long pipelines isn't that bad of a thing, because the majority of your day to day would doesn't care that much anyway, and most of the time when you need something as fast as possible its a small repetitive algorithm that could be predicted.
no?
this is my sig.
I've been Ippy Dippied to death.
Now that would be a realy interesting.
I think that the reason for P4 wanting expensive rambus is becouse of it being a bad design. If it were a good chip it would run well(not bad) whit DDR and even faster whit RAMBUS.
Not to trusting of Tom's Hardware? Have another set of benchmarks.
Stop spreading FUD about DDR chipsets and do a bit of research first. Any set of benchmarks I've seen has shown Intel's i850 w/ RDRAM and SiS 645 chipset in a dead heat - and most of the time SiS comes out on top.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
A single bank of DDR provides more memory bandwidth (2.1GB/sec versus 1.6GB/sec) than a single bank of RDRAM.
Two banks of RDRAM can provide higher bandwidth than a single bank of DDR, but that surely isn't a fair comparison, as the cost of the dual bank motherboard is very high, and the RDRAM even higher.
So what was your argument again?
Breaking News -- Terrorists have attacked the United States.
Once again, middle-eastern terrorists from Osama bin Ladens' Al Qaeda terrorist network have attacked The United States of America. The attack of September 11, 2001 pales in comparison to this highly coordinated, massive attack.
The White House, the Capitol Building, and the United Nations building are smoldering in ruins after being attacked by truck bombs and hijacked commercial airliners. Thousands of government officials are presumed dead while rescue efforts are being hindered by intense heat and smoke.
There are reports of further attacks in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Miami.
* Unconfirmed: Rumors are surfacing that the heart of Los Angeles was attacked using multiple 10-ton ammonium nitrate truck bombs detonated in multiple locations.
* Confirmed: Large portion of downtown Chicago sprayed with anthrax via multiple cropduster aircraft. Sadly, the terrorists operating the cropdusters were able to disseminate almost their entire arsenals of anthrax before being shot down by US military F-16's. In this first ever wide-spread biological attack, millions of innocent men, women and children were exterminated like insects.
* Confirmed: Nuclear explosion in New York City. A rental truck carrying an unidentified type of nuclear weapon was detonated in New York City early this morning. Details are sketchy, but US Government officials are saying the blast was somewhere in the magnitude of 15 megatons.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney are believed dead in the White House destruction.
Nuclear strikes have been launched by the United States military against Phillipines, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Somolia. All of these countries have been hit by at least five Titan II ICBM's and one 100-kiloton thermonuclear warhead; millions are believed to be dead.
Martial law has been declared across the entire US in an attempt to try and control the wide-scale looting in major US cities. High ranking military commanders have assumed control of the military retaliation, as the President and Vice President are presumed dead.
Government officials who weren't killed in the attacks are now attempting to keep control the chaotic country from the bunkers under the White House. The US Government is broadcasting nationwide television and radio announcements to inform the public of the status of the country.
I suggest you all stop what you are doing and spend some time with your families, because quite frankly, World War 3 is upon us.
More details to come.
How exactly does using DDR memory for both processors "level the playing field"? Since these are both very high end consumer processors, why not use the best memory available for both of them?
Or you could think of it another way: would it level the playing field to run a test of Intel vs. Athlon both using RDRAM?
Pentium IV slow
from DDR bottleneck
Athlon is faster
or does the name northwood imply that it'll download pr0n starring peter north faster?
Agurkan was saying (I think) that if you design a cluster with a certain Gflop budget, you can achieve the same net performance with approximately 10% less P4 nodes if those P4 nodes are 10% faster.
So maybe there's other specialty cluster hardware that drives up the per-box cost, but if you start talking about dual-cpu boxes, it gets even worse...
Ten nodes with $600 (2 x Athlon 2000+) and $1500 Gb NIC = $21,000
Nine nodes with $1200 (2 x P4 2.2 GHz) and $1500 Gb NIC = $24,300
for comparable net performance.
I guess if you're trying to break a speed record, a 10% speed gain might be important even if the price doubles, but if you have to be on the 'bleeding edge' then you're probably not concerned with $$$ anyway.
I can only hope the second activity didn't go as badly as the third.
You missed the point, you uneducated piece of crap.
If we were comparing system performance, we wouldn't necessarily use DDR for both.
However, since we're comparing CPU VS CPU (NOT SYSTEM VS SYSTEM), they try and keep all the other specs similar.
It's to see how the Athlon compares to the P4; not how an Athlon computer compares to a P4 computer.
Just the fact that this post got modded up so high shows how totally uneducated in these matters the Slashdot crowd is; maybe you should go back to playing with your kernal, instead of ranting about something you have no authority with?
It should be fair if if both processors were to use their optimum RAM types,the one they were initially designed for? The Pentium 4 was designed for RDRAM. Now they are designed for DDR rather than RDRAM.
The Athlon as a fist advantage because it is more high IPC than the P4. Memory access is certainly a factor in this.
The P4 wins ordinary benchmarks because it can use the higher bandwidth RDRAM. Other benchmarks show otherwise. See tomshardware.com.
It should be more of more interest a price/performance ratio, for the consumer point of view.
Thinking that this kind of processors will be of more use for clusters, the price/performance ratio is an issue.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
obviously needs more hardware. Dead already.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I just knew it.
I've not read the article because it's still /.'ed, but...
I was wondering about the stability of P4 vs. Athlon platforms. The awsome overclock-ability of the P4's has gotten me very interested in them, so I've been reading up on the recent reviews. Reading them carefully, I've caught a few interesting lines about the Athlon systems locking up some when running benchmarks, but the P4 system running like a rock. Makes me wonder if a P4 wouldn't be a better choice when you want performance and stability, with the Athlon being a better choice when you want performance and low cost. While this doesn't sound like a big deal, it is if you're like me and like to leave your computer running 24/7.
Just wondering if anyone had any comments on this as it's not something that I've seen anybody mention anyplace and it seems very relevent.
What a total fuckup do these low-life morons from /. make...
:)
damn... there's no story posted about the AMD Athlon/Linux CPU bug,
but instead they post this : "Buy John Romero's Ferrari On EBay".
Those anal fuckers suck.
Yeah moderate this up, if ya dare
The p4 platform is simply not designed for DDR in mind, adding DDR in the i84x boards are afterthoughts and IMO I would much rather use Intel boards with Intel processors.
I've too noticed in general, that genuine Intel motherboards always do seem to run faster and more stable than ASUS/ABIT/MSI/SOYO/whatever. Too bad they deliberately do not put any overclocking features whatsoever into their BIOS's.
I've got an old P-II/350 MHz machine that has a genuine Intel mobo in it that I swear still runs just as quickly (just by "feel" not by any benchmarks) as my P-III/800EB machine.
I'm about to build a new P4-2.0a machine and have thought seriously about using an Intel D850MVL motherboard with Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 SCSI card and Seagate 15K rpm disk drive for use as a multitrack audio workstation in a recording studio. That should be plenty fast and ultra stable too.
It's not just that DDR is a mature tech for AMD but not so much for Intel. It's that the two memory types work very differently, and how the processor expects data to arrive is going to be affected by the memory. P4's are designed to expect the higher bandwidth and latency of Rambus -- they expect to wait longer, and to get more in one chunk.
So no, I think that this would skew results in AMD's favor. I actually think that a fair comparison would require Rambus on the P4 system, and DDR on the AMD system.
Was hoping to upgrade this summer...
Oh and so we are on topic: it sure is interesting about all them Athlon vs. P4 comparisons!
sic transit gloria mundi
That article always left a funny taste in my mouth.
Why was he comparing next-gen DDR (DDR333), which isn't officially out yet, to the OLD PC800 RDRAM? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare PC1066 RDRAM (see the AcesHardware benchmarks)?
PC1066 RDRAM and DDR333 will both come out officially around the same time in official chipset support.
In other words, next-gen DDR performance for the P4 is about 1.5 years behind the RDRAM performance. Tom didn't mention that part...
In other news, Samsung is sampling PC1200 RDRAM now, too. 4.8GB/s in a dual channel config.
most of the sites that i have seen benchmark the two processors head to head using generic applications.
however, intel does not concentrate on applications that do not require more cpu power like office apps. who cares if i run office app with benchmarks slightly slower? as if when i type i eat up the cpu. i mean i bet it will be idle 99% (and one percent for other system processes)
intel is now concentrating on multimedia (which shows their lead over amd most of the time.) the good thing about intel is that they are concentrating on new technologies such as the sse2 and hyperthreading.
on the sse2 side, the performance of the pentium 4 2.2ghz beats athlon by as much as 64% in specially programmed applications like lightwave 7. and more than that if you enable hyperthreading, you can get a rough gain of 30% on certain applications including server apps. so if your program has been properly programed and compiled you can have gains of around 100% over the fastest amd.
and here is the catch. when you buy a pentium 4 2.2ghz, most people will overclock it to 3ghz. so that is worth the high price. and amd won't be having any athlon xp 3000+ soon.
intel has very good fabrication technology in microchips (not just processors.) they have upgraded their fab plants to 0.13 micron and 300mm wafer. so actually the hefty price of intel cpu gains them more profit than amd (and in the latest financial results, intel has earned $1.8b compared to amd loss of $61m. intel's gains would be bigger if not for their network and wireless division's loss)
intel has many cards to show. i mean a processor having roughly 55m transistors in it (around 4.5 times more than amd) what are they all doing in there?
just wait and see. intel will slowly activate more features in pentium 4 that are already built in to it or things that in can handle. like release a pentium 4 with 133fsb (over the current 100mhz) will surely make it fly.
by the way, i will report to you guys after we get our engineering sample of pentium 4 (without any multiplier locks!!!!!) let's see how fast the pentium 4 is over amd. note than pentium 4 scales very well.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
The problem with this analogy is that it looks at the wrong thing. The performance of a CPU isn't a matter of how quickly it can do one thing (ie, how fast it can finish a race), it's a matter of how much it can get done in a given period.
/big/ assumption, but for the purposes of this argument it's reasonable)), that means the P4 is retiring about 1.33 instructions per clock cycle. (Note that the 1.6ipc figure for the K7 is from an old RealWorldTech article by Paul DeMone that I can't find right now - it's somewhere in the Silicon Insider archives . . . )
A much better analogy is water flowing through a pipe. You want to get some volume of water out the far end, so you have two choices: you can pump the water through a thin pipe really quickly (the P4), or you can pump the water at a slower speed, but through a much fatter pipe (the K7).
The K7 core can retire, on average, about 1.6 instructions per clock cycle. At 1.667GHz, that means that your XP1900+ can complete about 2.667 billion instructions per second.
Now, assuming the equivalent performance on benchmarks and the like indicates that the P4 2000 can complete about the same number of instructions (since it gets the same results at that clock speed (this is a
/That/ is the fundamental difference between the two chips: the K7 completes more instructions every time it's clock ticks. That's what people talk about when they talk about "brainiac" versus "speed demon" processors: the P4 gets it's performance because it completes lots and lots of clock cycles in a given period; the K7 gets it's performance because it does a lot in every clock cycle, even though it completes fewer cycles in the same period.
CPUs aren't a horse race - they're a production line, where what matters isn't how fast an individual thing is done, but how many things get done in a given time period.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
You have it so completely backwards you must be a troll.
Although the review says that using the i845 chipset with DDR memory gives "a nice level playing field when it comes to pure processor verses processor benchmarking," the i845 chipset is actually known to be a dog and the Pentium 4 performs much better with other DDR chipsets. The LinuxHardware review may be a valid comparison of an all Intel solution against a multi-vendor AMD solution, but its not a reasonable "processor versus processor" benchmark until they pair both processors with their best DDR chipsets and motherboards.
..it is slashdotted now..
Where's a summary of the results for this? Wouldn't it have been nice so I don't have to click thru? Not that I'm lazy or anything :-)
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
There is another clock speed issue to examine as well when comparing these technologies. There has been frequent mention of comparing RDRAM and P4 with Athlon with DDR, for various reasons. One of these is that the RDRAM is "faster" and more mature, so therefore will "level the playing field." The problem with this is the addiction to the clock speed rating. PC800 RDRAM does indeed run at 800 Mhz, but it only runs at a 4 bit bus width. DDR on the other hand, only runs at 266 Mhz FSB, but runs on a 64 bit bus width. Because of this, RDRAM chokes when you are doing RAM intensive tasks, where the DDR has plenty of additional bandwidth.
Just my $.02
Ed
(insert attempt to be witty here)
Standard animation programs are quite expensive on a per processor basis. Once you get past blender, things get expensive FAST.
Actually, any specialized field has expensive options that real professionals need. Except programming. And that's because of the FSF. GNU/FSF tools allow programmers to get away from the hyper-expensive tools. But animators, circuit board designers, secretaries, architects, etc. can't write their own applications. KDE, OpenOffice, etc. are working on the problem for secretaries (there's a lot of them, and middle management generally uses the same toolset, plus a few). Blender exists for animators, but it isn't (doesn't appear to be?) up to professional use. Gimp is challenging Photoshop, but only Kontour is challenging Illustrator, and it needs a LOT of development. etc.
So per processor licenses effect a lot of folk. (Well, few word processors need multiple processors, but you know what I mean.)
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.