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"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head
StewedSquirrel writes "Anandtech has published an article taking a look at the low-end of the CPU market today. It takes Intel's newest Celeron processors against the AthlonXP and Duron with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz thrown in for comparison. All of these processors will cost you under $120, but the article shows that the old Duron (at barely $40) can out-perform Intel chips costing nearly 3x as much. In addition, it shows that the performance of the Athlon XP is head and shoulders above the Celeron processors, while costing roughly the same."
I love my shiny new AthlonXP 2500+. $90 for retail packaging, scoring well above my old P3-500, with plenty of room to overclock.
-bZj
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This is something everyone who has built systems and read any reviews in the past few years knows. The duron isn't really that great of a deal but the 1700+ and the 2500+ axp chips are unreal. Both perform exceptionally well, overclock like a dream, and unless compared to c varient (800mhz fsb) p4's absolutely rape everything performance wise.
Shadus
Athlon MP wasn't tremendously successful penetrating the server market, but Opteron appears to be making serious headway!
IBM has the e325, and Sun is about to introduce Opteron servers in a big way. Opteron thorougly rips Intel's x86 server offerings, especially in 2P and 4P configurations, and is extremely competitive with Itanium at a lower price (and with no software recompiles required).
Opteron should also do really well in the workstation and high-end PC markets.
This is all great for AMD, since Opteron is a high-margin part that kills Intel's high-margin x86 parts. The design wins with major OEMs just keep on coming...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I think it was mentioned before but is worth repeating.
Not only are AMD great value for money, but you can upgrade them later quite cheaply too.
I have an 850MHz PIII laptop, and it is quite close to the point where the packaging changed for the +1GHz chips. So I can't upgrade what is essentially a perfectly good laptop.
I find this greatly annoying, and will be buying AMD next time round.
Anandtech is a big site, they have ads from every major computer brand known to mankind (almost).
If you watch closely or reload the page you will see Intel ads. On the left side of one of the pages there is a "Intel; Click here to get more performance" ad
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
I think that concern has been answered by the nForce series of MB chipsets. I've built several nForce2 based systems, and they are rock solid. There is a single unified driver from NVIDIA for sound, network, I/O and so on. If you use an NVIDIA graphics card (my preferred brand for various reasons) one vendor is supplying all your drivers. That is a very nice level of accountability, and better than almost all Intel systems.
There was an article not too long ago about how happy a major corp. was with HP nForce based business systems. The unified driver architecture was a big win for them.
From what I hear, Opteron is also extremely stable. I hope to find out for myself before too long... =)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Athlon64. It runs slower when it's idle, saving alot of power.
Well, all CPU's are completely silent, it's the fans that make noise
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I used to work at bestbuy. The salesmen are only taught how to sell the service plans. anything else they're told to read the box. so all they have to go buy is the bigger the number the better.... i dont know if other retail outlets are like this, but i assume its close.
wud
This is nonsense. The Prescott will dissipate over 100 Watts. The current crop of P4s are up around 90 W. Those high clockspeeds directly translate into high power consumption.
There is no real-world thermal issue with AMD CPUs. They even have Intel-like thermal protection these days...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
You can get a good nforce2-400 board without onboard video for about $80. You can get a retail AthlonXP Barton 333mhz fsb 2500+ cpu (with fan) for $90. You can get a Radeon 9100 video card for about $60. Throw in some good quality 2x256 ddr 3200 ram for dual-channel goodness for less than $100 and you have the guts of a machine that'll run all but the very latest and most cpu-intensive games with total ease.
I figure the whole thing with 120gb hard drive, burner, dvd, case, monitor, etc. will run about $800. Imho it's the best deal on the market right now, price/performance wise.
BTW, the VIA EPIA boards are based on the VIA C3 and the VIA Eden (an underclocked C3). Another advantage of the VIA CPUs is that they're multiplier unlocked, so you can easily overclock. If you can find a Nehemia Eden, and it's cheaper than a 1GHz Nehemia C3, crank that multiplier up through the roof.
Much as I like Intel's Pentium M processor, AMD actually doesn't do that bad here. The Pentium M running at 1.6GHz consumes somewhere around 25W of power. AMD's AthlonXP-M chips for the "thin and light" market consume a maximum of about 25W at ~1.4 or 1.5GHz as well (unfortunately AMD does a piss-poor job of documeting their mobile processors, so a bit of guesswork is required). The Pentium M is a slightly faster processor, but the difference shouldn't be huge.
The AthlonXP-M "Desktop replacement" chips consume more power with no improvement in performance (except being available at higher clock speeds), so they don't do all that well, but then agian, their compeititon is the P4-M. Here AMD actually has the low-powered solution, as the P4-M chips quite the power hogs.
FWIW Tom's Hardware did a comparison of two nearly identical notebooks, one with a Pentium-M and the other with an AthlonXP-M.
It's clear to me the amd64 is by far the best VALUE, bar none. Clearly it is unfair to benchmark a 64bit chip with 32bit applications, but still it comes out on top. Unix is normally 64bit and in true 64bit mode it really runs circles arround the the dual G5 despite all the marketing machine (and lies) of Apple. No chip has more attention from developers today than the amd64.
The amd64 is only for Unix users that can bootstrap a compiler and know how to use it. This is changing rapidly and there is atleast one distribution that will work -- FreeBSD-5.2. (Should be a distro by Christmas.) Still if all you want to do is run binaries, get an ecconomy processor! I don't see Microsoft coming out with a 64bit system anytime soon. So for those lusers it may not be all that 'futureproof'.
Love my amd64 -- and Unix. You get out what you put in, to be polite about it. Three months ago, when it was purchased it seemed like a computer hobbiest's curriousity item, but things move fast and it is the best buy.