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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 notice that Anandtech describe an 800MHz machine as "chugging along". Hardly. One of my older machines is an 800MHz Athlon Thunderbird machine with 256MB RAM and a 40GB disk. It runs GNOME and WinXP without any problems and continues to be extremely responsive and perfectly adequate for the vast majority of tasks I throw at it (except Games).
The same is true for budget chips - if you want a machine to go online, to do Word Processing, play a few older games or whatever, these chips are perfect. Putting together a full-blown capable system for $400, or buying secondhand, is a great way for people to get in to computing who couldn't otherwise afford it. Getting them on the bandwagon is the important thing, and whilst the hardware is so far ahead of the majority of software (at least until Longhorn comes out...) getting more people using computers in their homes is a really good idea.
I see AMD advertisements on the web all the time, but they don't seem to have much of the "big name maker" market. Why not? Is Intel so intreched that their value doesn't even matter any more?
AMD seems to have been kicking Intel's butt for a little while now technically.
I'd love to see some brand name servers start using AMD chips, look at what AMD's doing on the low end!
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I read the article with two Intel banners. There goes your conspiracy theory.
And a "not trying to troll" back at you, but I've used both AMD and Intel at home (seems every office PC I've used has been Intel) and never had a problem. I run a webserver, both SQL and Oracle DB's on them, do all of my side gig development on them. I have to admit I did once have a mobo problem, but that was an aBit KT-7 RAID board, which turns up in google all the time with problems. I turned it into a pretty cool looking wall clock.
I actually have a K6-2 (400 MHz) still running at home, as a matter of fact. My "fastest" is an Athlon XP 1900 (time to upgrade again)... never a problem with any of them.
I wonder, then, what the difference between your experience and mine is? Do you typically buy the top of the line or one-offs? I usually stick to one-off's regarding performance, and I wonder if you've been experiencing newest run problems.
I dunno, it just makes me curious.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
... that whenever I bought a new motherboard + CPU, and then after 6 months decided to upgrade I would ALWAYS have to by a new motherboard + CPU.
They changed their CPU specs faster than I change between my two pair of socks. (almost..)
It was like whenever they released a faster Celeron or P3 you would have to buy a new motherboard because the number of pins were (your current pins) + 1, and then we had the Slot-1 to socket 370,371,372,373.... Dunno where we are now.
I'll be modded down as flamebait or offtopic, when this is stuff that matters (...) Still stick there at 1.25GHz on your G4s apple? Tsk.
May not be that much off-topic, actually. It's blatantly obvious nowadays that clock frequency isn't closely linked to performance, especially when comparing different architectures like PPC and 386.
I don't think it would be nonsensical to run a benchmark comparing PPC, Intel x86 and AMD x86: if you read a few of the articles at Ars Technica, you will see how incredibly complex the P4 is. In these conditions, it wouldn't be surprising that Intel's chip is as different from PPC as from AMD's chips.
OK, I don't see how AMD AthlonXPs and Durons outperforming Intel Pentium4s and Durons is news, but does it really matter much anymore? Those are desktop CPUs and that's a declining market. High-density servers and portable devices need low power-consumption CPUs and that's where Intel is way ahead of the competition. I'd like to see a performance/watt comparison of AMD's notebook CPUs and Intel's Pentium M line.
1. RISC vs. CISC.
Dude, go do some research on the latest Pentiums. They may still be saddled with having to support a CISC instruction set, but they are primarily RISC processors "under the covers". Plus one of the primary selling points of RISC way back when was that since it used a "simpler" instruction set, they could clock much faster. Well uh, that blows your comment out of the water. Fact is, a 2 Ghz PPC can outperform a 3Ghz P4 because of design decisions made by Intel on how to achieve performance.
2. Bus speeds.
How of the things that has hamstrung Apple for a long time WAS their lame bus speeds and general lack of performance in the systems surrounding the cpu (slow memory, slow support buses, etc).
3. instruction speed. this is where AMD shines!
Once again you blow your first point right out of the water with this statement, and reaffirms what I said earlier. Intel chose to go the route that says "we'll achieve performance improvements by architecting a system that allows us to easily increase clock speed in leiu of doing more per clock". Others, like AMD, choose to achieve more per clock at the expense of making it harder to scale their clock rates up. Go read about pipelines to get a better feel for where these tradeoffs are made.
Oh a couple more things. 1) Comparing Apples to Sun (by which I assume you mean to compare PPC to SPARC) is just as meaningless in the context in which we're speaking. 2) you should be modded down, but not because of your opinion, just the general lack of accuracy in your post.
Is that AMD chips burn out 3x faster than Intel chips.
AMD procs run hot but that is why there is such a thing as a heat sink. Many people do not know how to properly use a fan with their heat sink, and many have never heard of silver compound. If you dont cool the AMD proc well you will have problems. So the word is heatsink... say it with me now h-e-a-t-s-i-n-k.
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
It seems like AMD has fixed their heat problem with the XP line. My old Thunderbird 1.2 GHz ran pretty hot (60+ c), but this shiny new 2600+ actually runs much cooler (40-50 c), not to mention more powerful.
Also when AMD came out with their new "product rating", like most prople I was skeptical. However, the ratings do seem to be accurate. In every one of these benchmarks, the XP 1700+ smokes the P4 1.8 GHz.
I've got a desktop system with an AMD K6-2 500 Mhz processor and 512 MB of RAM. The hard drive is a Western Digital 7200 rpm with 8 MB of cache.
And Dell still ships new machines with 4200 rpm hard drives.
Sure, I could buy a new 3.6 GHz system, but it would be slower than the one I've already got.
I've been building fast machines on a budget for the last 7 years. What most people fail to realize is that the average desktop user never uses more than about 300Mhz of processing speed. The rest of the clock cycles are spent waiting on the hard drive, memory bus, ethernet card, or the modem. My system building strategy is this:
- I buy the fastest hard drive I can afford. I get one with the largest cache offered.
- I use motherboards with the fastest system bus offered.
- I buy as much memory as I can afford.
- I spend the rest on the processor.
Anything above 1 GHz is simply irrelevant; I'll never use the processing speed. However, adding RAM and a faster hard disk does noticeably improve performance.And I always smile when people compliment me on the speed of my Macintosh (I've got a blue case) and I tell them it's a 500MHz PC. They can't believe that a processor "that slow" could be so fast. As if the processor speed made any difference.
It's not the hardware, it's how you configure it...
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For the next few years/decades, there is a definately a market for desktop CPUs. So, yes, this article definately matters.
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