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."

Comments

Why DDR on P4?

[kawaichan]

P4 was designed with Rambus ram in mind.

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 .13 Athlons, hopefully it will work out ok.

Re:Why DDR on P4?

[ergo98]

For these comparisons to really be valid they should base them on price : i.e. "We have $2000 to spend on each platform", and if the Athlon gets to use an 8MB cache HD because of the money saved on the RAM, well then so be it. Most people do vary their options based upon the price, so it does seem to be the most pertinent factor.

Re:Why DDR on P4?

[aminorex]

Because nobody with an ethical bone in their body
would buy RAMBUS.

Nor, for that matter would anyone who cared about
getting a fair value for their dollar.

Re:Why DDR on P4?

[liquidsin]

But the test isn't about biggest bang for your buck...AMD wins that test hands down every time. The test is about comparing performance. If we had to do it by dollars, we'd be running the Athlon 2000 XP against a P4 1.9Ghz (according to pricewatch).

Re:Why DDR on P4?

[ryusen]

i've got an idea.. why not run the test on BOTH rdram and ddr? that way we can actually see what the difference in the two chipsets are? and then add in a little thing about th eprice differences so we cna judge that for ourselves too

Re:Why DDR on P4?

[ergo98]

Well my contention is that the processor alone does not a PC make. Perhaps the AMD processor requires a more expensive motherboard and more esoteric cooling system, meaning that they'll have to sacrifice elsewhere. Perhaps RDRAM exacts a cost penalty that hurts the Intel elsewhere.

Money is never "no object", and just about anyone who states that quickly changes their tune when the $s add up. Why don't the big comparison tests include 15,000RPM hard drives and U160 SCSI? What about some of the high performance server backbones? They don't because those features exact some hefty costs, and when Joe Average who thinks he's going to max out his system sees what that costs with his GeForce3 Ti500 64MB video card, super 16 channel 24-bit soundcard, etc, something always gives. I've done that classic spreadsheet game a million times where I settle on a lesser harddrive but up the RAM, etc.

In the end the $ is always the deciding factor. Just because a Nissan Altima and a Ferrari Testarossa have 4 wheels doesn't mean that they're directly comparable.

But...

[Matt2000]

... 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.

Pretty irrelevant

[Ryan Amos]

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..

Re:Pretty irrelevant

[agurkan]

well,

for one thing CPU is not the only part of hardware you buy. eg. if you are building a cluster, and need a certain computing power having a performance increase of 10% might be significant since it will save you 10% of nodes which might include a gigabit ethernet card or a myrinet card which cost ~$1500 (i am not sure about the price, but it is in the right ballpark). and, this is not counting all other things that go in a cluster node. that is why dual processors are not such a bad idea in clusters :)

so, IMHO it is pretty relevant.

DDR only doesn't make much sense.

[macinslak]

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?

Finally, a review NOT by Tom's Hardware

[kochsr]

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

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

They all work faster than my P-150. They're all fast.

Re:Processor 101 (Re:DDR vs. RDRAM)

[Henry V .009]

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!).

Wrong. The P4 was designed for high memory bandwidth. In fact, that may even be why it performs better on RDRAM chipsets than DDR chipsets. Who wudda thunk it?

Goddamn slashdot moderators. My orignal post gets modded down as a troll for pointing out a valid hardware issue, and this piece of cluelessness gets modded up.

Upper Headroom?

[4of12]

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.

Ultraslow? What are you & the moderators smoki

[Kjella]

ultra-slow MP processors

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

Re:In an effort to remain accurate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google runs off a cluster of 10,000 servers and employs 250 people. Slashdot does not.