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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."
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.
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Well, to a degree. To a first order, the Athlon keeping up is just because it is more of a "brainiac" (high IPC) than the P4 "speed-demon" (high clk freq.), though the P4 also doesn't resemble any of the machines normally called speed-demons. Memory access is certainly a factor in this, but the fact that the XP "keeps up" is due to its higher IPC (which is more complicated than just branch mispredictions, though that certainly is a big factor for the P4).
The P4 wins in streaming benchmarks because it can use the higher bandwidth RDRAM (and by use I mean not only capatability but having the FSB bandwidth to not throttle the memory). There is no reason to think that it should be able to use any memory access method "as well as or better" than an Athlon, because no matter what it will be limited by its inherently lower IPC.
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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.
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.
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There are reasons that you might want to consider spending the extra on a really hot processor. The main one I can think of is if there's something else very expensive as part of the setup. The biggest, most obvious one I can think of is software licenses. I've encountered software with licenses of as much as $8000 per processor, which obviously places a very large premium on having the fastest possible processor running it. I'm sure that there are other applications with even more outrageous prices, too. When you're forking out that much for your software, hardware costs start looking pretty tame.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
You'd think that if they wanted to show AMD up, they'd just clock them at > 2.5GHz now and keep going. I'm puzzled.
You're confusing sports with business. Intel's job is to make money, not to show up its competition. Don't assume that Intel's profits would be boosted by having the fastest part around. Indeed, in 2000, Intel made $10 billion in profit which is more than any other tech company has made -- before or since -- in a single year, but for at least half of the year, their fastest part was appreciably slower than AMD's (AMD, meanwhile, who is highly interested in showmanship, is losing money every quarter).