Athlon or Pentium, which?

[thefish8]

Looking to build a new box and want a processor in the price range of $200-$300. I've always been on the AMD side, but why is the price and clock speed seem to be better with the Pentium? Example, compare pentium 4 3.4ghz 800 to athlon 64 3800 where the price is relatively the same, but clock speed is an extra 1ghz.

 

[PKing1977]

AMD chips do more per clock. ghz do not mean the same thing that it did several years ago. clock for clock AMD chip is much faster than intel. Along with the other benifits there is just no reason to buy an intel chip right now.

PKing

 

[thefish8]

Originally posted by: PKing1977
AMD chips do more per clock. ghz do not mean the same thing that it did several years ago. clock for clock AMD chip is much faster than intel. Along with the other benifits there is just no reason to buy an intel chip right now.

PKing

Excellent, thanks for not making me look like an idiot.

 

[RichUK]

you?ve been here since 2001 you must know how to use the search button, this topic has been so over done. especially the Ghz debate :disgust:

why did you not use the search button

I WANT TO KNOW, I WANT TO KNOW NOW

 

[RichUK]

Ok simple answer, its all about the formula below now, since the work load per clock is different between the two CPU's, so Ghz is not the defining answer anymore

IPC x frequency = performance

IPC = Instructions per clock

that Intel p4 you have asked about does 6 instructions per clock, and the Athlon you have asked about does 9 instructions per clock.

6 x 3,200,000,000 (3.2Ghz) = 19,200,000,000 instructions per second

9 x 2,400,000,000 (2.4Ghz) = 21,600,000,000 instructions per second

the difference between the two processors is 2,400,000,000 instructions per second, which equates to the Athlon being 12.5% faster, and the athlon pwnts the intel again because it has short/less amount of pipelines (12 pipelines for the Athlon i think against 36 for the P4 prescott IIRC), therefore making the Athlon 64 better in games as it can clear down (refresh) the pipeline a lot quicker for the next lot instruction for the fast changing/action games, where as the p4's have to rely on HT (HyperThreading) to saturate the long pipelines .. and all of this blah blah blah other things that come into it aswell, like the heat and architectural build of the core, and the way it operates

There are also alot of other things that factor into the AMD Athlon performing faster, which i would like to add in now but i have to leave as i have now finished work

 

[Topweasel]

ON DYE MEMORY CONTROLLER..... The lovely Athlon64 models can talk directly to them memory and not have to go through the chipset. This and the small (12 stage pipline) give the Athlon64 some of the lowest Latency seen on the consumer market. Think of it this way something bad happens and the pipline needs to get flushed and re populated, and the information needed would have to be pulled from cache, the 12 stage pipeline would mean at a minimum it would take 12 cycles before we see information needed leaving the pipline, on P4 (Pres) its a best case senerio of 32 cycles. This happens Hundreds and thousands of times during a given second.

So for the A64 its Higher IPC, Smaller Pipeline, and a direct connection to the memory for a cache refresh.
The P4 has 2 advantages (besides the few things made to negate some of the severe performance loss). Higher speed which helps in simple program and simple games, and HT (which makes smoother use but can slow down your primary program so the CPU can handle something else.

 

[RichUK]

Originally posted by: Topweasel
ON DYE MEMORY CONTROLLER..... The lovely Athlon64 models can talk directly to them memory and not have to go through the chipset. This and the small (12 stage pipline) give the Athlon64 some of the lowest Latency seen on the consumer market. Think of it this way something bad happens and the pipline needs to get flushed and re populated, and the information needed would have to be pulled from cache, the 12 stage pipeline would mean at a minimum it would take 12 cycles before we see information needed leaving the pipline, on P4 (Pres) its a best case senerio of 32 cycles. This happens Hundreds and thousands of times during a given second.

So for the A64 its Higher IPC, Smaller Pipeline, and a direct connection to the memory for a cache refresh.
The P4 has 2 advantages (besides the few things made to negate some of the severe performance loss). Higher speed which helps in simple program and simple games, and HT (which makes smoother use but can slow down your primary program so the CPU can handle something else.

O yeah the on die memory controller .. how the hell did i forget that :thumbsup:

not to mention with the p4's, because of the longer pipeline it suffers a lot more if it has level 2 cache misses (pipeline stalls) and therefore will increase its cache miss penalty of how ever many cycles.

 

[ncage]

You'll pretty much get a standard consensus from *most* people here...go AMD. If you overclock i would get possibly an amd 3200+ 939 with a venice core. If you can raise your limit for a processor a little bit i would get a 3800+ x2. This is a dual core processore so its like getting a dual processor machine.

 

[thefish8]

Originally posted by: ncage
You'll pretty much get a standard consensus from *most* people here...go AMD. If you overclock i would get possibly an amd 3200+ 939 with a venice core. If you can raise your limit for a processor a little bit i would get a 3800+ x2. This is a dual core processore so its like getting a dual processor machine.

Yeah, I'm down with that x2, everything I've read sounds great. Thanks for your help guys.