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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.
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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Take a look at
d ex .html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/in
They posted the results of their showdown 2weeks ago.
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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.
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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?
Just killing time while my program compiles and the site becomes available again.
...the Pentium 4 verses Athlon XP war...
'Pentium 4 verses'? Are they anything like Spam Poetry?
It's 'versus', Mr. Editor Sir.
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.
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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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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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!
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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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).