Slashdot Mirror
Intel's 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Unleashed
EconolineCrush writes: "Intel has released a 2.4GHz version of its Pentium 4 processor, and The Tech Report does an excellent job comparing its performance with previous Pentium 4 processors, and the latest in AMD's Athlon XP stable. There's more to this story than just another notch on the MHz pole, as the review showcases some new benchmarks in an already diverse set of tests, and shows the new P4 leveraging an impressive performance from RDRAM-based platform. Incidentally, the slack demand for RDRAM has it almost as cheap as DDR SDRAM."
Since they only tested with a single OS, and that OS was Windows XP(a fairly new release of a historically unstable operating system, probably rife with performance bottlenecks that are more apparent on some types of hardware than others) these benchmarks are principally useful to Microsoft Windows users.
It'd be nice to see similar tests with a couple of linux kernel variants (1.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.5.x) and some BSDs, Solaris, whatever. Just get some heterogenity in there and see what difference OSes make, hardware vendors are famous for tuning their systems to meet benchmarks after all.
--Charlie
Same reason people think the "24 valve" emblem on their car makes it "go faster".
They don't even know what a valve is, let alone what the number of valves represents in engine design, but hey, 24 is more than 16.
--- witty signature
Take the latest from both Intel and AMD
Run standard stuff on it, AMD moves faster at a much smaller mhz.
Run stuff optimized for P4 on it, Intel now has the advantage.
Pay through the nose for Intel's latest and greatest.
So...whenever one of them releases a chip it comes down to do you run something that is intel optimized where you would get the performance boost? Also, do you want Intel on Intel, which'll work with 99.9% of stuff out there, or do you want to save a bundle and get AMD on Via/AMD/AliMagic/Whatever and have some possible incompatabilities?
But is that a 24 valve V8 or a 24 valve V6, if it's a V6 then the 16 valve V8 (especially if it's a big block =) will kick it's ass!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
GTRacer
- It's true! It says so right here on this cereal box!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
I'm about to read the review, but I'm guessing the Intel CPU performed better. Otherwise the headline would have been "AMD Slams Intel Once Again!".
In order to defeat the lameness filter, I will point out that MP Athlon boards are a lot cheaper than a few months ago and that I want one, and that it's about timeto hit Pricewatch.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
For the past few years, about 4-6 by my estimation, the real bottleneck in all PC systems has been the HD. Most speed problems can easily be solved by getting a HD that spins @ double the speed. Of course this won't make your quake game faster, or encode mp3s faster, but most of the time, the percieved slowness in a computer is due the HD being slow.
RAM can help, in fact I place ram as being the second thing that you should upgrade after a HD. Mostly because you don't gain much after you double your ram capacity in a PC. After about 400 megs of ram, you really won't see too much improvment in normal usage. (No, editing 100 meg TIFFs in Photoshop/GIMP is not NORMAL, sorry if your camera generates those)
Of course you can throw all these reccomnendations away if you don't use the PC in a 'normal' enviroment. Servers, crazy mp3 machines and video toasters won't benefit from the same upgrades as a normal PC.
The answer is a pretty complicated one and to explain that would require some basic knowledge that you just can't squeeze into a 30 second commercial.
...i'll quit while i'm ahead...
You have essentially identified the root of many, many problems, for example, in my world, I personally consider these issues to be very important:
1) Why don't people listen to Ralph Nader?
2) Why do people listen to Britney Spears?
3) Why do people eat Vitamin C and Echinacea in massive quantities?
4) Why do some people believe Creationism belongs in public schools?
5) Why is Prozac(tm) legal and marijuana illegal?
The discussion required to analyze these issues last longer than 30 seconds, so instead:
1) 97% of the voting bloc votes republicrat
2) Britney spears has sold millions of albums
3) Herbal remedies run rampant w/nearly zero clinical support
4) Evolution is market for extermination by some board's of education
5)
Anything that takes longer than 30 seconds to understand is far beyond the Oprah-fried brains of the masses.
What makes us think the masses would care about facts?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Why are we comparing a ~$600 chip (P4) to a ~$250 chip (Athlon)? Sure, it's fun for a little ego brawl to see who has the fastest chip on the block, but this has little practical information for the consumer. All this says for Intel is "Hey look, I can build a slightly faster chip for SSE2 optimized apps for 250% more!". I'm not impressed. It's not only the MHZ that don't matter, the AMD "model numbers" should be irrelevant too. What really matters is price/performance. I'd rather see a ~$250 Athlon benchmarked against a ~$250 P4. Then simply mention that if you want P4's fastest offering, you can plunge $600 for it.
We don't compare the MHZ or model numbers between the Geforce and Radeon video cards - we only compare price and performance. The same should go for CPU's.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Just a little competition and we have cheap ultra high performance CPUs! Back in the 80s, no one would dream of computer hardware with such performance.
One monopoly in the OS market and we have restrictive bloated ultra expensive insecure operating systems! Back in the 80s, I wonder if this is what people were dreaming about...