Coppermine vs. Athlon

SaDan writes "I checked out a comparison of the new Intel Coppermine processors and AMD's Athlon chips at Tom's Hardware Guide last night. It's kind of interesting, and I thought others would be curious about how Athlon stacks up against Intel's latest offering. "

Comments

even if coppermine is not as fast...

[laymil]

it still pushes AMD to improve their design, perhaps to the point that the K7 can also be used in portable devices. i think that the major appeal of intel's newest processors will be in the laptop arena. it would be awesome to have the same power in a laptop as on the desktop with an x86 processor.
i really hate to say it, but it's getting to the point where it can be cheaper to buy a new system than to upgrade an older one (especially with DRAM prices so high.) of course, with the introduction of new processors and technology, older (obsolete?) models become much cheaper, and hey, a better processor is a better processor. competition is good, as long as the competition doesn't force either company out of business. that would be bad.

Bad News (Good News)

[Christopher B. Brown]

The bad news for AMD in this is several-fold:

• Intel steps things up on the number-of-megahertz side of things, which is good for marketing.

  (Of course, anyone that should be considering these high-end processors should be competent enough to know that performance is only positively correlated with the number of MHz. They don't run lock-step...)

• Coppermine comes better prepared for laptop configurations

  (Of course, there aren't many really-high-powered laptops; there was only ever one Alpha-based laptop, few SPARC-based, and such... I agree with others that availability of faster AMD chips in the K6 series is more important at this time...)

• It's probably more important news that engineering-quantities of Itanium chips are starting to be released.

  (I half-expect to see a report from VA-Linux Systems some time soon...)

Slot 1 vs Slot A?

[G27 Radio]

I'm hoping someone can clarify something for me. If I understand correctly, the slot that Pentium II/III's go in is called Slot 1. Intel patented Slot 1 so that other companies could no longer make replacement processors.
So AMD had to stick with the Socket370(?) form (which was the non-proprietary Pentium Pro socket.) Until they came out with the Athlon. AMD (or somebody) created the Slot A socket which is suprisingly(not!) similar to Slot 1 but not compatible. Main question: Is Slot A proprietary also? Or can other companies make processors for it other than AMD?

NOTE: The above is based on many guesses, assumptions, things I've read, and things I may have imagined reading. Please correct me or clarify (I'm sure there are errors.)

numb

?syntax error

Re:Slot 1 vs Slot A?

[hazydave]

Ok, first of all, forget completely about "Slot". That's just a hookup, a physical connector, it doesn't tell very much of the story.

Slot 1 is the second physical delivery of Intel's P6 bus; Socket 8 (for Pentium Pro) was the first; Socket 370 is the third, and there's every indication Intel will market a Socket 426-or-thereabouts to handle some extra pins on a socket-based Coppermine chip. The reason you can't clone this without a license is simple: Intel has patents on the P6 bus. They originally didn't license, but now they are licensing, at least to chipsets (SiS, ALi, VIA) if not CPUs.

AMD extended Socket 7 (which is once of the physical conventions for the non-patented P5 bus) to 100MHz, and ran their K6 family there. But they realized that K6 would have its limits. In part of their IP settlement with Intel, they promised not to make clones of things like the P6 bus, so legalities for everyone else aside, that wasn't an issue.

Enter DEC (now part of Compaq). DEC designed the EV6 bus for the Alpha 21264, as a remedy for conventional CPU buses. In their earlier Alpha systems, even with L1..3 cache and all, they were so dependent on memory speed, the typical bus sharing in an SMP system (very important to DEC) was a problem. Especially when you wanted to make this bus (the cricital CPU to rest-of-the-world link) extremely fast. EV6 is a point-to-point bus; all you have is a CPU and some system chip on it, never anything else. This allows them to run EV6 very fast. DEC openly licenses EV6, AMD adopted it for their CPU. Since the PC market demands a socket or slot, they created Slot A, which (for cost reasons) uses the Slot 1 connector turned around. AMD runs Slot A at 200MHz now, 266MHz in the forseeable future. DEC runs EV6 systems up to 400MHz. This is a data rate; the bus runs DDR (a new data event on every clock edge, not just every clock cycle), which really doesn't matter; the data rate is indicative of performance.

The important thing to realize about today's Athlon systems is that they're something like the first Pentium systems shipped out, retrofitted '486 systems much as the first Athlons are running based on modified Super7 chipsets. So memory is stuck at 100MHz, half the CPU interconnect's speed. You won't see Athlon reach its performance potential until 200MHz, or better, memory systems are delivered.

And I do mean "or better" because of the EV6 architecture, there's no shared CPU bus. So a system chip (North Bridge) can actually use memory faster than the CPU can deal with. With switched interconnects, proper buffering, and super fast memory, one could imagine PCI, AGPx4, and multiple Athlons all rompin' along, each at virtually full speed. This can't be done efficiently within the current P6 architecture. That's why I find Athlon interesting. I hope AMD lasts long enough for it to realize its potential.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

[tekman]

The main thing that AMD has gained out of this whole Athlon thing is respect. Real respect. Not just, "Gee, since I'm a very poor geek, I'm going to put an AMD chip in my box."

To illustrate: my college's career fair was just a few days ago. AMD was there. They have been there in the past. In the past, only die-hard computer engineering hardware geeks talked to them. This year, however, as they had Athlon processor periphenalia and even a couple actual processors (none of which they were giving away) there was a line. I'm talking about a long line. Everybody wanted to talk to teh AMD guys. I waited in it for over twenty minutes then decided that since hardware doesn't make me feel an extreme amount of joy inside I would go talk to someone else.

Bright Young Minds (at least, I think that's what we are) are taking notice of AMD and are intensely interested in being hired by them. This seems like a Good Crowd to have on your side when speculating on the future.