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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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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!"
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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.
They didn't even tackle the the Green Celeron. After all, Celeron is derived from the latin word 'celer', meaning speed. Of course, celery is the fastest of all vegetables.
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.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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
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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The article had 3, yes 3, banner ads for AMD when I viewed it.
Conspiracy mod ~ON~
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
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.
It sounds like you're blaming general system configuration issues on the processor.
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
... 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.
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?
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.
The ads are random. I got a load of whoosing intel ads.
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.
(Page 8) is this correct? 18.4 Seconds to compile QuakeIII Arena Source Code on a 2600+ ? Maybe it's right, but I was expecting it to be longer.
Damn that's fast - all those months/years of id's hard work, only to compile in 18 seconds on a budget processor....
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
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.
Many thanks Anand - this article will be a great help to many small system builders being beaten to death by Dell; many (such as myself) cannot compete with Dell on budget Intel kit of the same spec.
Having an article like this to show potential customers will mean I can provide better performing systems at competitive prices using AMD.
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
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.
At work, I use a similar system, with a cheap no-name heatsink. I got back from Japan this week to discover that the second CPU in three months had burned out. In the store room, we have a load of machines that have burned out in the same way. AMD chips get hot, and will burn themselves out less than a minute after the fan dies, so if you want to protect your investment then spend a little extra on a good quality heatsink and fan - it'll probably still work out being cheaper than an Intel equivalent.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
I'm not sure it's possible to kill those chips. I got a 350MHz one when they were new, and ran it at 420MHz (105x4) for a couple of years, using the heatsink from my old P133. It is still going (with the same heatsink) in a friend's machine, although now running at its rated clock speed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
> I'm running an AMD K6 1.1 GhZ chip
Ladies and gentlemen, our new overclocking champion!
There are fans and there are fans. Try to find a CPU fan/heatsink with a large diameter fan, they won't need to spin as fast and are therefore much quieter. I have found Arctic Cooling's Copper Silent and Slim Silent Pro are whisper quiet, especially compared to my older Zalman "Rolls-Royce Spey" CP-5000 fans. A case with room for 12cm case fans instead of the 8cm ones also helps.
Oh, and if you can step down a notch or two for the gfx board, there are passive cooling solutions out there that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. My gaming rig has a Ti 4200 with a passive Zalman cooler superglued to it - works perfectly.
My main workstation is a dual Athlon 2000+ MSI board with a pair of AC fans, two 12cm case fans plus a Seagate Barracuda drive and it's barely audible.
Money for nothing, pix for free
I don't know what you mean by "burnout", but if you're overclocking that may be the cause, stick to motherboards that support it. Check out OVERCLOCKERS.COM or the chaintech line for some nice toys.
If you're actually cooking these things then you'll probably have the same problem with BOTH INTEL and AMD. INTEL certified cpu fans and power supplies tend to be beefier and move more air than the cheeper ones sold for AMD, but that's because you can usually cook eggs on pentiums. I try to keep systems I assemble to a case temperature of 75-90 degrees after 1 hour runtime. It seems to help all the systems but I've found pentiums tend to perform better when you add 2-3 fans to help. That one power supply fan just doesn't cut it.
Watch your airflow in the case also, the airflow should move over your chip location and not leave "dead air". An extra exhaust fan behind the chip pulling air out as well as a intake fan pulling air in the front should help. If you're using the new ULTRA ATA drives you might want to add drive coolers also. If the case is too jammed up with cables (like servers) try the new rounded cables, they really cut the case temp down.
You can check your runtime temp usually in the bios.
Good luck guy, hope the next chip you roast is idaho and not silicon.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
Its depressing when the "low end of the CPU market" beats all four of your machines.
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
Has anybody noticed that Anandtech is testing this budget, $60 to $90 processors using a radeon 9800Pro w/256mb of video ram? That's a $400+ video card!
Is people really buying this kind of video card on a budget PC? I'd rather test the processors using a budget video card instead. It might become the bottleneck in some games, but I think that's what the consumer wants after all... an idea on how much faster their game will run on a realistic machine, not in this monstrosity.
But the best thing about AMD is that a modern Socket A mobo will still take pretty much any SoA chip and most older mobos will take chips that weren't even thought of at the time. Compare that to the Intel alternative, where upgrading is a painfully expensive business. Any coincidence that Intel sell a lot of mobo chipsets? Never.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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.
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.
Heh heh - - I pushed it to around 160 on a generic VLB mainboard and thought I was in heaven. I've built more systems for myself, friends, family, and work than I can remember, and every one has been built on AMD. CPU related stability issues have never - - and I do mean NEVER - - been a problem. My years of system building have convinced me that, when stability is a problem, you should eliminate drivers, physical connections, adapter cards, and mainboard components in that order. I know bad CPUs do surface occasionally, but I think that most people get themselves in trouble through pushing voltages/clock cycles and not compensating with good cooling.
I hate seeing money wasted, and the Intel name to me has the same connotations as "BMW" - - it's more about hype than bang-for-buck.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I have many old(er) computers around here. My fastest is a Pentium III laptop, and my slowest is an old Pentium 133 box. Basically, whenever I got to the point where I needed an upgrade, I just got more RAM. Cutting down on swapping has brought me significantly greater performance improvements than having a "faster" processor.
Further, I am sick and tired of the market hype that surrounds clock speeds. It's not the processor, but the software that needs to be made more efficient. And because many programs spend a lot of time processing graphics and GUI stuff, I think that making video boards "smarter" by adding GUI-specific processing features would bring a significantly greater performance improvement, by offloading crap from the main processor, than speeding up the main processor.
All of that said, it doesn't surprise me that an old processor is "faster" than a newer one. There are hundreds of variables affecting their respective performances, the biggest one being the software used to test them. In most cases, I think it's like comparing apples to oranges.
Personal computers have gotten so fast and powerful in the past couple of years that I think what's under the hood is totally irrelevant to 90% of the users. The other 10% have specific needs because of high-end applications or something.
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...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Now granted, I've only installed roughly two hundred AMD Athlons in the last six months, but every one of those worked exactly as you described. Out of the retail box, installed on the board, I use regular heat paste just to cover my ass (it's optional), attach the provided heatseak & fan, and it runs flawlessly.
I've seen a few manufacturing errors with the chips, but no more unusual than with the 200 or so Intel chips I've installed in that same period. I have never encountered a situation where an AMD chip with the provided heatsink & fan did not run at the advertised speed or voltage.
As for the 9 months, you may be interested to know that a large volume of components goes bad in the first few weeks of use. Where I assemble machines, we run a burn in test on every processor that is sold. This means that our customers rarely see a new but bad chip, however we see them often enough to not get excited when it happens. If you buy a chip from a place that doesn't do these burn in tests, then YOU have to carry the burden of dealing with a manufacturing flaw.
But anyhow, stick with Intel if you like. It's my opinion that they're overpriced and (as a graduate student in computer science) I'm convinced that HyperThreading (tm) is 85% hype and 15% feature.
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.
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 :-)
My Athlon box sounds like a buzzsaw Mine does too. Athlon 1.4. The generic fan that I had would work for the desktop, but as soon as I tried to convert some movies or anything using 100% cpu it would overheat and (thankfully) shut down ( vs. melting down). Got a ThermalTake Volcano on there, and it is extremely loud, but there have been no overheating problems. I am tempted to try that Arctic Silent thing.. really getting tired of the noise. calamari
On a related note, ExtremeTech has an article detailing how to build a fast PC for $800. The final recommendation uses an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU with 512 MB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, and a GeForce 5600XT video card.