AMD Ratings explained

[Sonikku]

I apologize if this has been asked a million times, but my repeated searchs have not turned up many results. I'm in the market for a new CPU and I'm having a hard time comparing chips and sockets. I know that clock speeds are not all created equal among sockets, hence AMD's decision to have rathings like 3700+ and what not. But now I've come under the impression that not even these ratings can be used to semi-accurately compare CPU's against each other. In the machine I'm posting from right now, I'm using a Socket A 2400+. It was cheaper then the Socket 754 cpu's and I didn't think the speeds of the latter justified buying the latter. But now it seems like a Socket A rated at 2400+ gets the living daylights beat out of it by a 754 rated at 2600+, yet the difference between a 2200+ Sockat A and 2400+ Socket A is marginal.

Now I'm seeing Socket 754 3000+ Venice chips, with the same code name and rating as the Socket 939 variant. At first I figured that because they were both rated at 3000+, they were some what comparable. I was under the impression that the Socket 939 was newer technology of course, which just meant it could achieve the same performace at a lesser 1.8ghz while it took the slightly older 754 Venice 2 ghz to compensate for it's older design. Yet clock speed asside, 3000+ = 3000+, correct? Or not? I guess what I'm what I'm trying to say is that I thought the XXXX+ ratings on AMD cpu's where a unified universal way of getting an idea of a CPU's performace compared to another, taking in the socket type and clock speed to give a standard for comparison. Do these ratings only apply for comparison of cpu's using the exact same socket? How does one measure the general performace of a AMD chip across different Socket types? If anyone could provide me with a brief explanation or a link to place that does, I would appreciate it.

 

[stevty2889]

939 chips tend to get a slightly higher rating do to dual channel, so they compare a 2ghz 754 chip to a 1.8ghz 939 chip, since 939 has dual channel, which really usualy only translates to about a 5% performance increase. They will also give a higher rating for cache. A 1mb cache chip at a 2.2ghz, gets the same rating as a 2.4ghz chip with 512k cache. But in most cases when you compare these differant chips side by side, the one with the higher clock speed usualy performes slightly better in most applications. Oh, and I don't think any of the 754's are venice, should be new castle or clawhammer, maybe some winchesters, but I could be wrong. In any case, if you are looking to upgrade, I would go with 939, because at least there will be the chance to upgrade to later on, or you could wait for M2. Or just get the Asrock board, that will allow you to use 939 now, and upgrade to M2 later.