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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."
It seems to me that the number of market sectors may be the ultimate decider here, rather than the actual technology :-(
:-)
Intel simply have larger resources - they can push money at blue-skies research, and non-profitable lines, whereas AMD (although successful) have to "bet the company" on every major decision...
In a way, I think it's because AMD is such an underdog, that I like the company - although the fact that their chips are damn good helps a lot
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
It's time for people to stop rewarding the Intel marketing machine, and start buying the best tech - AMD!
At the high end, 64-bit addressing is just icing on the cake! :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
A decent number of companies took up dual Athlons because of their great price to performance ratio, and Opteron looks like it'll become even more popular with the same type of people. It also has 64bit going for it, which will be useful for getting beyond memory limitations. I haven't really been paying attention to prices lately but Xeons are expen$$$ive in comparison AFAIK.
yeah i'd agree with you...you will get modded as flamebait/offtopic. myself included
do you even realize though that the IBM chips that Apple uses are completely different from Pentium processors?
RISC vs. CISC google on it. then repost.
if you want to compare processors speeds you'd be better off comparing Apples to Suns (err hide pun in there somewhere...well maybe not)
if you look at the tech specs a 2ghz apple will outperform a 3ghz pentium. why? because of a couple of reasons
1. RISC vs. CISC.
2. Bus speeds. ever notice how pentium class chips bus speeds don't seem to increasing at the rate of chip speeds? the processor can't do squat if it's waiting for info all the time.
3. instruction speed. this is where AMD shines! as an example (number made up to infer point) an Intel multiple instruction takes 40 clock cycles (so on a 3ghz chip if my math is right you can perform only 75mega multiples) where as on an AMD chip a multiply is 30 clock cycles (which running at 3ghz will give you an additional 25mega multiples)
Intel is for HW what MS is to SW. they don't redesign to improve performance they just leave it there and add extra stuff.
Please mod me down now thank you
On a serious note, people, including myself, are starting to worry about power consumption. I'd like to pick up a low power device for a BSD gateway.
Agreed! I'm currently interesting in replacing my 400Mhz desktop. (I've got a 1ghz dell laptop, and 12"TiBook) It's used mostly when I either don't want to unpack my notebook, or want to take advantage of my 21" monitor.
I have three major "wants":
1. Be good on power...I don't want to power it down. (Does linux suspend well yet?)
2. I want it to be quiet...I don't want to be able to hear it.
3. Major brand. I can build and support my own machines, but don't want the hastle with this one.
It is very hard to shop for something like this, as it's not something that is well marketed. I don't need it bad enough to be willing to spend major time comparing hard to find specs on a model at a time basis. I am sure swordbuy and myself are not the only ones with desires like this.
AMD was high on my list, and it just jumped a little bit higher.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
It sounds like you're blaming general system configuration issues on the processor.
I've been seeing Centrino ads in the grey boxes at the beginning of each page. Also the page I'm on in the article right now has an ad for the Intel 875p chipset.
Conspiracy mod ~OFF~
^_^
First of all, this wasn't an Intel vs. AMD, and it seems you missed the point. The benchmarks are meant to compare BUDGET processors, that is, costing under $120. Clearly, the performance/price ratio is much higher for the AMD. Don't believe me? Go look at the benchmarks (and if not the ones on that site, then on other sites, like THG or something). I have been building Athlon XP systems since they came out and I have not had a single issue. Perhaps you just don't know how to go about configuring your computer? Same goes for your uncles. Second, running hotter is irrelevant. Even with an OEM heatsink/fan, you will not have any problems. They are designed to withstand those temperatures, and they will be unharmed all the way up to 85C. I have had it run in the mid 70's for extended periods (due to overclocking) and they have worked fine right after. If you want to buy Intel, be my guest, but your loyalty is unfounded. I used to be an Intel guy, shunning everything AMD, but experience doesn't lie, and I have been a happy camper since day one.
A blog like any other.
is the term "low end of the cpu market," as if to imply these chips are somehow less than adequate...
Bah.
Both of my current linux desktop machines run these "low end" chips, and they run just fine, thanks very much. They all have a bunch of RAM... but other than that they are very vanilla... 1.3ghz Durons all. It makes you wonder what's really driving the CPU market (other than wow-look-at-this-shiny-new-CPU marketing).
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
These Sub-$100 CPUs serve as decent upgrades for aging systems (e.g. the P3-800 that is barely chugging along)
I'm using a P3-550MHz, and it's fine for everything I do all day.
Can I have that 'useless' 800MHz chip when you toss it?
What are they doing to bias it then? They have so many benchmarks covering every possible usage pattern. Are they just making the benchmark numbers up? Or perhaps their pricing information is false? Give some evidence of the bias and I'll believe you. In the meantime, go find the other sites that reach the same conclusions. For example Tom's Hardware
What it sounds like is that you didn't know or bother to find out what the hell was going on with those machines.
Wow, compatibility issues with winmodems. Imagine that.
Did you or your roommate ever stop to think that the problem might have been in the power supply (internals or cabling) that was burning out those motherboards? I doubt it.
The rest are configuration issues, except the heat. So make sure the heatsink is set properly. Done.
If I buy a boxed AMD processor with a heatsink, then I shouldn't need to buy another heatsink, or special "silver compound" or do ANYTHING special. The CPU should go in, with the heatsink provided, and work at the CPU clock rate advertised without any problems. What you're saying is that I need to take "special" steps to ensure my stock CPU running at the stock clock speed, core voltage, etc runs normally and lasts longer than 9 months. That's bullshit.
I'll stick with Intel.... I've had Intel machines running just about 24/7 for 7-8 years without any issues, even when the heatsink fan busted, the processor didnt croak like AMDs do even with fully functioning fans.
Took the damn thing back to their house and a whole bunch of the extended family was there, it being the holidays and all. They check out the computer and they are all, "Nice computer, only 2.6 GHZ though..."
:) This is the angle that Dell takes. They have those silly charts that shows 2.6GHz is only good for email and web browsing, while 3.0GHz is what you need for serious applications and gaming. In reality, it's only a 15% difference in raw clockspeed! And the actual performance increase is less than that, of course, because the bus and memory speeds are still the same. Okay, and the 3GHz machine uses significantly more power (more than a 15% increase), but Dell doesn't advertise that.
Heh
There really isn't a high-end PC market any more. ALL PCs are high-end.
Well true enough. But again the purpose of the article was to look at low end processors. I don't think the c variant of the P4 is a low end processor. As you can see, they only included processors in the same price range, keeping only one of the P4 for comparisons.
Pelops
Its probably to move the bottleneck away from the video card.
Welcome to the world of mass marketing.. of course most people have no real idea of the internal functions of a processor (nor do they need to), but Dell says that they need a PIV 3.2 GHz so that's what they look for, so they can read their email.
:)
I think a lot of people are realizing now that they don't need such processor speed. My Dad is still chugging along with his old 400 MHz P2, running Windohs 98. Asked him about upgrading, and he replied, "Why? It does everything I need it to.."
I'm seriously considering the 800 MHz fanless VIA as a replacement for my workhorse 200 MHz pentium pro. The low power consumption is a big plus, and it would still be plenty of speed for me, especially with a half GB of RAM in it.
Check benchmarks before doing the switch (to be sure). For the Epia series, the memory type is almost as important as the CPU speed and the Ezra vs Nehemia core.
My M9000 (Ezra 933MHz) trounces my V10000A (Nehemia 1GHz) in MAME simply because the M9000 uses DDR and the V10000A uses PC133 (on-board video needs to take its RAM somewhere).
Tomorrow I'll have my Epia5000 (Eden 533MHz) go head-to-head with my V10000A (C3 1GHz) just for kicks.
Whatever "insightfulness" the parent post contains is simply wrong. I work in a shop that sells both P4 and Athlon machines (among others) and we obviously produce a lot more profit when we sell an Intel chip because of the relatively exorbitant price.
The situation the parent post describes simply -does not happen-. If you take an Athlon out of the retail box and install it correctly, it requires no special additional parts and it will run exactly as advertised, barring a manufacturing flaw as I mentioned in my other reply. The only "special" steps necessary to make an Athlon run properly are to install it "correctly".
If that's reason enough to kick AMD in the teeth and buy Intel, suit yourself. I have installed WinXP on a P4 with a heatsink resting on the chip (but not latched down) so maybe there IS a real advantage for Intel in the "cannot install properly" crowd.
Yes, C3 stands for Cyrix 3. I still wouldn't throw them in with the disaster that Cyrix's M2 line, among others though. Under VIA, they seem to have found been improved, found a niche, and do what they do well.
I'm a little tired of hearing that Intel CPUs are more stable than AMD CPUs. Having used a combination of both for over ten years, I'd have to say there isn't much difference in reliability.
However, if you put a good chip on a cheap motherboard (PC Chips, ECS, etc..), use cheap memory, or overclock it without proper cooling it's going to be unstable no matter what kind of CPU it is.
I used to work for a company that provides hardware support for over 25,000 computers. Basically, large corporations would send their computers to us when something had gone wrong with the hardware. During our yearly reviews we would check to see what our most frequent problems were. It turned out that for all our CPU problems about 3 out of every 4 of them were AMD processors. This is unbelievable too, considering that about 19,600 of the computers we handled have "Intel Inside" of them, compared to about 4,100 for AMD.
We also noticed that motherboards with the Intel chipset fair much better as well compared to those that don't. Doing a little math, it's easy to see why Intel is on top. Even though the processors cost more in the beginning, in the long run companies still save money by using Intel. Especially considering that their is not much of a price difference for corporations when purchasing large quantities of Intel or AMD computers.
Microsoft should hire me. I can write code that doesn't work faster than the guys they have doing it now.
It's a valid point that Athlons do not last long after a fan failure. A perfectly valid counterpoint is that any reasonably modern motherboard will detect that and power the system off to protect the processor. I really couldn't consider this topic a very significant reason for choosing one processor over another, though, since fan failure is basically harmless these days (minus the awesome term paper you were typing that wasn't saved.)
You and your fancy pants 32 bit chips :-)