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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!
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
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 agree. G5s all round then. :-)
Cheers,
Ian
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?
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
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.
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
I love my VIA C3 Gigapro. I wish they had included the new EPIA stuff in their comparison. I would like to know just where they stand on a price / performance comparison.
Before you flame me for my low power chip (that was a joke, sonnnn! Laugh!), know that I went from that lowly 1.1GHz Duron powering my lab of 5 thin clients and overheating in the unairconditioned noonday heat of Bangkok several times a week to a VIA C3 600 MHz, with very little difference to the end user, and it's cool to the touch. No burnouts here.
The chip costs 300 Baht, or about US$7.00
Smoke them apples!
Put identity in the browser.
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 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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