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Intel Plans CPU Naming Change
Jemm writes "According to The Globe and Mail, Intel will start using performance numbers rather than clock speed to number their chips. 'Under the model number system, processors will be given numbers to describe their performance, in addition to being described as running at 2GHz or other speed.'"
The AMD numbering system has never been directly related to Intel's (officially) but is instead related to the performance of older Athlons... in effect saying "The XP 2700+ is roughly equal in speed to an original Athlon running at 2700 Mhz"
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Really, the technical community needs to sit down and figure out a universal cross-platform benchmarking method.
Well, there's SPEC and TPC. Other than that, benchmarks are both overrated and the best metric we have for evaluating performance. Then you have cases when a CPU is optimized for a particular benchmark to inflate performance numbers (hence the term benchmarketing).
Doesn't FUD imply it's untrue? If you don't like AMD (I don't, they just had a convenient explanation to link to), it's a similar situation with Apple, though they have a different architecture entirely.
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Older intel CPUs used a performance metric named iCOMP which was stamped on many CPUs. A bit of googling suggests this is still around. Perhaps this is another case of reinventing an old idea?
Intel has NEVER stated that Mhz equals performance. Go look on their site. They like to quote SPEC, and their own performance tests, and all the rest of the BS that companies do. Never Mhz. The Mhz myth comes from two places:
1) Fanboys. I first remember it gaining real popularity among the Apple fanboys when Apple went PPC. They claimed that the PPC showed a positive second derivitave (growth of growth) in Mhz where Intel showed a negative second deravitive and how PPC could scale to huge speeds that CISC just couldn't handle. That of course, neve came to pass. Which lead us to:
2) The anti-Mhz myth. That Mhz don't mean anything. This is just FALSE. When you compare a single architecture (meaning one kind of one brand of processor) mhz give a VERY good idea of how performance will scale. If something gets X on a processor at 500mhz, you can with confidence say it will get nearly 2*X with the same kind of processor at 1000mhz. That doesn't mean it's the be-all, end-all benchmark, just a useful (and truthful) was of evaluating chip performance within a line.
PR numbers are just a bunch of crap. So far, I've never even seen any that are reliably based off of benchmarks. Even if they were, it wouldn't matter. Show me any benchmark, I'll show you how it's not relivant to things a lot of people do. Like take SPEC. It is a big industry standard benchmark. People doing scientific and engineering work place a lot of faith into it since it benchmarks what they do.
Well Intel LOVES SPEC, their processors when mated with their compiler do very well at it. Does that mean we should use it? Hell no. SPEC isn't applicable to everyone. It's got nothing to do with games, audio, video, bussiness, servers, etc. It's a science and engineering benchmark. What's more, it's a benchmark designed to come form source code, so to bench the compiler as well as the system. It's a good, open, standard benchmark, but it won't work as the single number to completely describe chip performance (nothing will).
PR numbers improve nothing, and just confuse and BSify the situation. At least Mhz are factual numbers and have some basis in reality. From what I've seen of PR numbers, they are mainly a dream of marketing and don't apply to the real world.
Uninformed consumer goes to the local discount electronics store. Looks at a computer based on Intel's CPU, sees 2000 megalobangerz. Looks at the AMD based computer right next to it, sees 1800 megalobangerz for a hundred bucks less. Decides the Intel is "better", so its ok to cost more. Reality, the computers are pretty much the same.
AMD did this becuase their chips simply do more work per clock cycle, this was done at the expense of not being able to scale the clock nearly as high as Intel. A 2000+ AMD is *roughly equivillent* to a 2.0Ghz P4.. it wins some, it looses some.
The jump you talk of was at 2600+, when AMD went from a 2.0 Ghz at 266 mhz FSB (called a 2400+) to a 1.833 Ghz at 333 mhz FSB, called a 2600+ Barton. Performance #s goes up, clockspeed goes down.. but FSB goes up! Yes, it's annoying, but this was done as to give most consumers who do minimal research a "fairer" basis for comparison when shopping for computers.
MHz is an absolutely useless metric for comparing processors today when FSBs range from 200 mhz to 800mhz and cache from 128kb to 1MB and higher. Intel and AMD went different routes when designing their offerings, and as you say, it's very difficult to come up with a single number to describe their performance. The problem is that MHz is the number that has been 'historically' used, and it just so happens that AMD went the route that yielded a smaller MHz (and god bless them that they did); so they made the transition to a BS-marketing-numbers system.
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Doesn't FUD imply it's untrue? No. FUD is fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's what results when a fact is unknown, yet decisions have to be made based on that fact. If we knew that the FUD-source was false, it wouldn't produce any FUD. Unfortunately, we can't be so sure.
How about an explanation of the numbering system right from the horse's mouth
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from AMD's athlonXP site (doesnt' seem to be working right now)
web archive of AMD's site
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Now that's a trend I think is broadly continuing. Multi core CPU's are a part of it. We may also see async processors coming out with zillions of transistors, but no central clock.
Not Duron, but older Athlon Thunderbird. And it does not mean "3.2 times faster than Duron", it means it is fast as 3200MHz TBird would be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_rating
Why does this incorrect info keep getting posted (and modded as "informative" at that)? AMD stated several times quite publicly that their rating initially was meant to compare against the "Thunderbird" Athlon chips. More recently they've simply said that it's relative performance between the AthlonXP line and that it can "outperform it's closest competitors". Here's a direct quote from AMD's AthlonXP FAQ
Q: What does the 3200+ model mean?
A: This is a model number. AMD identifies the AMD Athlon XP processor using model numbers, as opposed to megahertz. Model numbers are designed to communicate the relative application performance among the various AMD Athlon XP processors. As additional evidence that performance is not based on megahertz alone: the AMD Athlon XP processor 3200+ operates at a frequency of 2.2GHz yet can outperform an Intel Pentium(R) 4 processor operating at 3.0GHz with an 800 FSB and HyperThreading on a broad array of real-world applications for office productivity, digital media and 3-D gaming.
AMD's model numbers not rated against Intel's P4 chips? You might want to tell AMD that!