First Benchmarks of AMD Hammer Prototype

porciletto writes "As seen on Ace's Hardware, this article features Quake 3 benchmarks comparing an 800 MHz ClawHammer sample to Athlon MPs at 800 MHz and 1667 MHz, as well as a Willamette Pentium 4 (256 KB L2, 400 MHz FSB) at 800 MHz and 1600 MHz. The benchmark results indicate a 40% performance increase over an Athlon MP for the ClawHammer. Additionally, the 800 MHz ClawHammer manages to tie (actually outperform by 1 FPS) the 1667 MHz Willamette Pentium 4."

Comments

Re:why would anyone buy intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words: Chipset stability. I know countless people who have been burned by non-Intel chipsets, VIA in particular.

One of two things is correct here; either most non-Intel chipsets do not following the PCI and/or AGP specification or Intel's chipsets never have and PC peripheral makers build to Intel's spec. In either case the result is the same, a lack of stability with name-brand components on non-Intel chipsets.

One of my friends recently went through three sound cards until he found a model that wouldn't randomly lock his VIA chipset machine solid. I have an Asus P4T-E with every PCI slot filled, and I use my machine for everything from development, to 3D gaming and it simply never crashes... ever.

There will no doubt be people replying this stating that I am full of crap and their VIA chipset motherboard is rock solid. Maybe so, but how many crashes did you have to endure first before you found a piece of hardware that wouldn't kill the system or a BIOS tweak that slows your system down, but at least lets it run stable. If it's neither, I'd say you got lucky.

Now having said that, AMD makes great CPUs, but as long as they are hampered by unstable chipsets I have no choice but to buy Intel.

Bah

[johnburton]

So --- AMD's next generation chip, which isn't out for 6 months proves to be only very slightly faster that Intel's current generation chip which is available now. If I were AMD I'd be very worried about now.

yippie !

[zozzi]

I made an experiment and found out that they're right about the hammer. The gui in MS-Word now really rocks!

In fact it took 1.205 secs to write "Hello World" as a heading with my Pentium and it took an incredible 1.215secs to click select Heading1 and type "Hello World" with the Hammer. The time savings is a whopping 8% or 0.01secs!!

Yeah i'll definitely buy the hammer -- after all if i have 100 headings in my document i'll finish early and can spend an extra second at the beach!