Coppermine faster than Athlon?

NoWhere Man submitted: "This was mainly generated because after speaking with a few friends it seems that submitting the article about Intel releasing 700+Mhz chips may have given people the wrong impression. The truth is that there is no real proof that these new processors are faster then the Athlon. In fact, based on past information, it would seem that Athlon would most likely come out the victor in a benchmark test." So which is really faster: Coppermine or Athlon? Hit the link for more details.

"True, the Wired article does claim that analysts said "it allows Intel to again say that it has the fastest PC chips." But there is no real proof behind this claim.

Below is a list of processor specs of the two chips (provided from UGeek).

Mhz Athlon=700Mhz Coppermine=733Mhz Bus Speed Athlon=200 Coppermine=133 L1 Cache Athlon=128 Coppermine=32 L2 Cache Athlon=512K(off chip) Coppermine=256K(on chip) Microns Athlon=.25 Coppermine=.18 Trans Athlon=22 mil Coppermine=28 mil

From these specs, the Athlon possesses the superior archecture. The only reason Coppermine is able to achieve 733Mhz is the 0.18 micron process (the chip simply runs at a cooler temperature). Athlon has an excellent CPU core, a fast FPU, and a superb overclocking ability. Only problem is with the chipsets and motherboards or lack there of. Intel chips are widely supported and have a good overclocking ability, but the archetecture is becoming saturated and out of date. Also, Intel had alot of trouble with the i820/Camino chipset which had delayed its release and all motherboards with the old design have to be destroyed. So the question is, how do you think Coppermine will do? "

Comments

Athlon is still faster

[nd]

While the Coppermine does narrow the previously large gap between the Pentium III and Athlon, the K7 is still faster. I've read many different comparisons between the two -- and the Coppermine, clock for clock, is definitely showing its age with its Pentium-Pro core. The Athlon has LOTS of room to grow.

Be careful when reading benchmarks, some tests include SSE enhancements without 3dnow! support. Some 3D performance tests use high resolutions to put the bottleneck in the video card and not the cpu (thus decreasing differences). A good reliable source for benchmarks is Anandtech.

Re:Athlon is still faster

[TecraMan]

The other thing to think about is the architectural differences of the chipsets.

For example, at present, the Athlon chipsets support 100MHz SDRAM (negating part of the advantage of a 200MHz FSB), and they don't have the volume to justify 200MHz SDRAM from the RAM manufacturers, but both the Intel 820 and 840 support Rambus (dual channel 3.2GB/s in the case of the 840). In memory intensive applications, this alone can make an appreciable difference.

Re:Athlon is still faster

[nd]

The VIA KX133 Athlon chipset will support PC133 SDRAM, a much more realistic technology than Rambus.

tom's hardware.

[lubricated]

recently toms hardware did some benchmark tests between the athalon and coppermine(aluminummine). The athalon smoked the coppermine in all tests except for 3d games. there the athalon was only marginally better. One has to interpret these results correctly. How can the athalon smoke intel in fpu performance and only barely beat them in game performance. tom was using an nvidia g-force. This board isn't even out yet and the drivers don't have any amd optimizations yet. This benchmark was not a good benchmark. Tom is known to do that often. Back to the chip. I would get an atholon over a coppermine anyday.

Chip Availability

[leiz]

Slightly offtopic, but when intel "releases" a 700+ Mhz chip, it's not actually AVAILABLE on the market... right now, you can buy an 700 Mhz Athlon but you'll have a much harder time finding a 733 P3.

Btw, the athlon is definately faster, the P3 is based on the P2 core which is a few years old (Klamath was released in 97?) P2 + .18 um process + higher clock speed + onchip cache + SSE = P3 while the K7 is a completely new design and it's specs are far superior to those of the P3.



_______________________________________________
There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.

I'm running an Athlon

[smkndrkn]

I'm running an Athlon 650 with the Asus K7M MB and it smokes running NT. I just installed HP LC3 Netservers at work with Dual XEON 500s with 512M RAM Running NT and my NT station at home still runs faster ( even before I put SQL 7 on the XEON box ). Now I dont' have any benchmarks to go with it just personal use. Nevermind when I boot linux on this ( now that the kernel has been updated ). My KDE desktop rocks. I would def. recommend the athlon to anyone who can find the K7M board. Gary

c't tests

[cdonat]

IIRC the german magazine c't did a Test (with existing systems, so no new RAMBUS etc. For the Intel and no 200MHz Frontside bus etc. for the Athlon. The result was that Coppermine running at 733MHz is still slightly slower than the Athlon at 700MHz.

200MHz memory?

[Terao]

Is 200MHz memory availible so you can use the fsb to it's full potential?

Re:200MHz memory?

[JDLazarus]

Unfortunately, no. Even if it was, the FSB that the athlon uses is actually a slight cheat, it's DDR (the same tactic things like the geForce are using) which means it picks up a burst on the rise and fall of the clock rather than just on one side. This means you're actually only running it at 100 mhz but it seems to act as if it were 200 mhz. The next load of K7s (due to release next year when the Dresden plant is in full production) will be .18 micron. They will also have onboard L2 and various other nifties. (I know that adding in this last part is a bit off topic, but I just thought I'd repeat what I've heard tons of times)

-Lazarus

Athlon vs Coppermine Benchmarks

[retep]

Tom's Hardware did a Athlon vs Coppermine benchmark on Oct 23. Here are the results:

First of all the i830 chipset wasn't available at the time so Tom used a Apollo Pro 133+ mb.

The results of the first benchmark, SYSMark98 under Win98SE, showed that the Athlon had %4 better performence then the Coppermine at all clock speeds.

The results of the second benchmark, SYSMark98 under WinNT4 showed about equal performence.

Under 3DStudioMax under WinNT SP5 showed that the Athlong was %30 faster then the Coppermine.

Under Quake 3 Arena under Win98SE the Athlon was about %6 slower.

Under Descent3 under Win98SE using OpenGL both chips were about equal in speed.

With Descent3 on DirectX the Athlon was about %3 slower.

In all the Athlon almost always did a bit better then the Coppermine. With the exception of the 3DStudioMax benchmark where the Athlon badly beat the Coppermine.

As for pricing the Athlon is about $60 cheaper.

You can see the full benchmarks here.

K7-550 Linpack Benchmark

[uground]

i have just installed a k7 550 system, and have run the linpack benchmark to know the megaflops that it can achieve result: 31.26 Megaflops i think it worth the 310 usd price roughly, 9.92 usd/mfps running debian

Athalon - in thery for SPECint/SPECfp at least

[stripes]

AMD's benchmark pages showed about a 9% lead in integer performance, and 45% in fp (using the SPEC suite of benchmarks) for a P-III and K7 at the same clock speed.

Assuming the coppermine is no better (or worse!) then the other P-III's (an Ok assumption) and everything scales with the clock (wrong, to the extent that there are cache misses) then bumping the P-III clock by 5% (733Mhz vs. 700Mhz) will pull even closer for SPECint, but not catch up, and will still be signifigantly behind on SPECfp.

Note, this is filled with "could be wrong" assumptions. But untill you can benchmark it yourself, it's not a shabby guess.

200MHz FSB != 200MHz RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the EV6 bus runs at 200MHz, system memory in the available Athlon motherboards are limited to PC100 RAM running at 100MHz or PC133 RAM running at 133MHz.

The EV6 front side bus is running at a physical clock of 100 MHz. However, the bus takes advantage of the rising as well as the falling edge of the bus clock for transfers, so that the technical 'speed' is 200 MHz between the processor and motherboard chipset. The motherboard chipset still communicates with system RAM at the physical clock speed.

When the PC133 SDRAM becomes available and mohterboards begin to support it, the new technical 'speed' between the processor and motherboard chipset will be 266MHz.

The EV6 bus will be ready to natively support the new DDR SDRAM as it becomes available since it uses the same techniques.

SMP Athlons

[The Iconoclast]

This is kind of off topic, but does anyone know when SMP Athlon boards are due out? My boss wants a Linux Computing Simulation Cluster, and I want to make it out of Dual/Quad Athlons.

Re:Try www.slota.com

[Eros]

If you go checkout www.slota.com it will show in the motherboards section all the different kinds of motherboards for the Althon. In there you will find a mention of Tyan producing a dual Althon motherboard by the first quarter of next year. I'm waiting for the same thing. :)

Actually, the website as a whole is pretty good. But, double check AMD's website. They should have information and especially warnings about the motherboards, power supplys, and memory types.

I ended up making the mistake of grabbing a MSI motherboard and a 700 Althon for my father. MSI's website (www.slota.com has links to the manufactor's sites if available, you won't find them otherwise) advertises the motherboard for Althon's 650 and higher. This isn't the case. Currently, only the Biostar and the Gigabyte board take a 700. Just double check and everything should be ok.

BTW, if you need a place to order the motherboards. Try, www.thechipmerchant.com they are pretty reliable, have four types of Althon MBs, and they have some great support.

Good Luck :)