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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!
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
If anyone here didn't already know this, please raise your hand...
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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~
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.
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.
I agree. G5s all round then. :-)
Cheers,
Ian
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.
Cheers, Ian
Touche. I'm actually a G5 fan myself, and will own one as soon as I can afford it.
Let's face it though, a lot of people (especially Linux people!) are committed to x86. Opteron/Athlon64 looks like the most future-proof route there, by far.
I've also seen some performance comparisons where AMD64 trounces the G5. Not that there aren't examples in the other direction, but clock-for-clock Opteron seems a bit faster. It'll be worth keeping an eye on things as compilers improve and applications are updated. We'll also see if new G5 speed grades up to 2.6 GHz. really appear this spring...if G5 can get ahead on the clockspeed front it could prevail in real-world performance.
According to some of those benchmarks, though, it has a lot of ground to make up...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Its probably to move the bottleneck away from the video card.
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.
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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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.