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Athlon Benchmarks Out
|jasper| writes "on AMD's home page they now have
Athlon processors benchmarked against P3 550.. Probably still biased.. but its something
" They claim that integer performance is slightly faster,
while floating point and 3d is significantly faster (at the same
clock speed)
Assuming that these machines are equivalently configured, AMD's statistians intentionational set the starting x-axis closer to 100% to give the illusion that Athlon is way faster than Pentium III. Don't get me wrong Athlon is faster but the modest 10% in SPECint_base95 looks like a whooping 10% by bumping the x-axis.
Doesn't it make you mad when people do shit like this? If you were to look at the bars and not notice the numbers, you'd conclude that the Athlon @550 was about three times as fast as the P3 @550 in the top two categories and about twice as fast in the third. It is in fact a good deal faster, but not twice as fast. When presenting just a part of a graph like this, the least you can do is indicate a break in the axis. This is pure evil.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Wasn't the K6 supposed to blow away the Pentium chips? The AMD graphs said it would. Sorry, didn't happen. Plus the little beasts were hot and temp-sensitive (15 degree operational range).
Wasn't the K6-2 supposed to blow away the P2? The AMD graphs said it would. Sorry, didn't happen. Even the Celerons whupped up on them (and then the Celeron A-series just made it look even worse for AMD).
Wasn't the K6-3 supposed to blow away the P2/P3? The AMD graphs said it would. Sorry, didn't happen YET AGAIN. The only areas where the chip really performed better was low-end Winstone. As if I really cared that a window would render itself on-screen in .001 nanoseconds instead of .02 nanoseconds.
The only machine based off AMD's technology that had any excessive power was the HYPE MACHINE.
I'll wait for some independent tests from the various hardware sites and my Q&A department before I go dropping cash for them. All these morons (Dubbed Athalonic Supporters on various forums) who pre-ordered theirs are dancing on the razor's edge.
In addition, the commodity market isn't going to see K7 for a while yet, as their production is going toward OEM supply FIRST. And the prices they're quoting right now ($324 for the 500mhz I think was one), are BULK pricing (in lots of 1000). Figure a fairly splefty markup to take place.
Sure, they COULD get lucky and get a chip that absoloutely tears up. Then again, they may get stuck with what the other AMD chip-buyers got. Buyer's Remorse.
I hope that AMD finally comes down with a winner on it's side this time. But I'll play it cautious and wait a while.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The K7 doesn't have a huge edge despite requiring a more sophisicated motherboard. Even if they make their volumes and already had the same reputation as Intel, it would still be a tight run for the money.
But AMD and Intel aren't on equal footing. Intel has enough cash in their pocket to be very competitive with their chips. For some reason, they also have a better reputation.
I'll buy one of these guys if I see one, but unfortunately, I think I'll see AMD go bankrupt before they get enough volume out the door to put a K7 in front of me at prices near the MSRP. I'm still waiting to see a K6-III for less than the price of a Celeron with motherboard.
I'm beginning to think it is a good thing that I didn't buy stock in the company.
As someone has pointed out below, SPEC benchmarks are designed to measure high-end performance, so they may not translate *directly* to Q3 frames-per-second. But they are proportional, to a large extent (at least on the x86 platform). And saying that CPU X beats CPU Y in Unreal FPS is a far cry from CPU X beating CPU Y in SPEC. The rules are a lot tighter for SPEC -- on the SPECbase numbers cited for the K7, there really isn't much room for compiler optimization or any other forms of cheating.
SPEC is a collection of thing like gcc, some heavy-duty simulations, other text processing, etc. designed to measure the integer (no extra "r", AMD!) and floating-point performance of a CPU-motherboard-memory-compiler system (a CS class in architecture will convince you that these are largely inseparable components, as performance goes). So while SPEC is "only a benchmark", it does determine that measurement using things we care about (e.g. gcc).
When I bought my K6 it was half the cost of a same priced Pentium.
:(
half the cost of the same price??.. what? hehe sorry for raggin on your grammer.. just couldn't resist
(you know. I really think this comment doesn't deserve 2 points.. but its automatic for me.. umm as a suggestion would it be possible for people to purposfully lower the scroes of their own post. This would be helpful in things that we don't think deserve a high score or things that we have to resubmit and would like to moderate the old one out of existance..hmm maby for having this nice suggestion this does deserve the 2 hehe -laugh- )
Also the results on the website are all 'BASE' values (i.e. little compiler optimisation). Presumably the P-III will beat the K7 under optimisation until compilers are modified for K7 optimisation.
Still, these figures are uncouraging.
We still need to support AMD. Think of a world where AMD did not exist, do you have any idea how much a pentium would cost? Intel only lowers its prices because it has to. Intel has publicly expressed that the only reason it is selling Celerons so cheap is because they need to compete on the low end. As soon as AMD is gone we are gonna get *ucked up the yin-yang by Intel. Besides, I don't want to support a company that sticks an ID on my processor... Call me paranoid.
The K6-III is the fastest chip at compiling the linux kernel (it beats everything except an overclocked Celeron), so it is useful for something - software development.
AMD's chips have also tended to be cheaper than the equivalent offerings from Intel.
While the distorted way the graphs are drawn is a form of cheating, the SPEC benchmarks are industry standard and very hard to cheat, because the rules are very tight, so the underlying numbers can be counted on: the new processor is a hair better than the PIII for integer, with a more significant gain for floating point. Of course this doesn't mean that your floating point program will run 50% faster, but as benchmarks go SPEC is about the best available.
The real question, though, is whether AMD will be able to manufacture this processor with sufficient yield to be able to meet demand or make money. In the past, the fact that they haven't been able to do this is the primary reason that AMD has lost money in recent years. If they can't convince the PC manufacturers that they have their past problems beat, no one will do a deal with them and the speed of the processor will not matter.