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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."
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.
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).
do not read this line twice.
... 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.
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?
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.
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.
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