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."

Comments

Wish they'd test with a better OS....

[Medievalist]

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

Re:Wish they'd test with a better OS....

[MisterBlister]

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.

Since Microsoft Windows users are about 90% of the desktop computer using population and about 99.9% of the gaming population (as even Linux users who game tend to have Windows partitions because that's where all the games are) and these benchmarks are primarily focused on gaming...Why should they bother testing non-Windows platforms?

Re:pushing MHz

[Darth Maul]

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.

The song remains the same

[Sabalon]

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?

Re:pushing MHz

[Sebastopol]

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.

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) ...i'll quit while i'm ahead...

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?

These benchmarks are a bit impratical.

[tshak]

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.