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Attn Anand: What about this P4 benchmark??

A

acejj26

Senior member
Can we compare just processors and not platforms with the new P4 and the Athlon?? I do not have the resources to do such a comparison, but here is what I suggest.

Pentium 4 1.4 GHz
Reference motherboard
1 stick of PC600 RDRAM (for 1.2 GB/sec of memory bandwidth)

vs.

Athlon 1.2 GHz
Any KT133 motherboard
1 stick of PC133 SDR RAM (for 1.066 GB/sec of memory bandwidth)

Keep all other hardware identical (ie. hard drive, sound card, video card, etc.)

This would let us more closely observe what the processors can do with respect to each other rather than let the supreme memory bandwidth of the P4 overshadow certain results (cough, Quake 3, cough). Anand, can you do something like this???
 
Ace, Memory has to be installed in pairs on Intel i850 motherboards. It uses a dual channel double pumped system so you have to have 2 sticks in the motherboard.
 
It has to be dual channeled?? I thought that by using one stick, you effectively halve the memory bandwidth. By using one stick, the system will not operate??
 
Yes. Memory must be installed in pairs on the i850. So unless you could find PC300 RDRAM... it won't work quite the way you intended.
 
Damn...Well, I guess we'll just have to wait until SDR chipsets come out for the P4. I have this serious feeling that the P4 will get absolutely b*tchslapped by the Athlon in every benchmark.
 
Yeah- I like AMD and think the TBird is the best chip to buy right now but I don't see the logic behind this.

Lets put the Athlon on a 33MHz bus and take away its heatsink and see how long it lasts against a 386.

heh.

Platform is just as essential as the CPU. If there WAS an SDR platform for the P4 then it would be a valid test but since there isn't, it is not valid.

No reason to submit the CPU to conditions it wouldn't be under in a user's system.

Eric
 
BTW did I not read somewhere that PC600 ram wont work witht he P4 (has to be PC700 or better)???
 
While we are at it. Lets underclock the Radeon and GTS to match that of a V4 to make it a fair comparison.

What where you smoking?
 
very true, Intel has gotten way too much flak on this chip way too early, first people complain about them getting chips out too late or not doing anything but beefing up an old core to stay alive.

Now that Intel has a chip, a good chipset to go with it, and some good memeory (not to mention good bandwith to go with it) they are being critisized by not having good benchmarks upon its release. I'll give props to Intel for really planning ahead on this one. And i wont say anything bad about it for at least another year, by then it still wont even be mainstream, and in 2002 or even later, when this becomes more common place, if it isnt pulling its weight then, then ill be ready complain.
 
The i850 supports PC600 and PC800
just like the i840.

The i820 is the only one that supports PC700.

Eric
 
I've got nothing against Intel or the P4. I like the platform behind it and think that the dual channeled Rambus memory subsystem is great. But I just thought it would be nice to have a comparison between processors and not platforms. Maybe if we had dual channeled DDR memory for the Athlon, we could really see something. But that would require WAY too many pins and traces on the motherboard, so we probably won't ever see that.

True, I have an AMD system right now, but I've had two Intel systems before. I just think that the P4, in its current state is a lot less than what we expected. We should hope that Intel can tweak this core like they tweaked the Pentium Pro core to give us the level of performance we have today.

I said use PC600 memory so we can have similar memory bandwidth between the platforms. Anyone see that in the Best Buy circular today when they advertised the P4 system from HP, they actually emphasized PC600 memory?!?!?!? Why would they announce that they are using slower memory? I'm sure this will hamper the performance of the system.

Anyways, I just started this to say that I think that if you take away the dual-channeled Rambus memory subsystem and compare pure processor performance, than the P4, right now, isn't much. It excels only in situations in which the benchmark requires a lot of memory bandwidth, which tells me that in situations where memory isn't the bottleneck, other processors win out. I just thought it would be interesting to see what the processor could do with the memory bandwidth that is afforded to the P3 and the Athlon.
 
Right but when you're talking about the price range that the P4 is in, you don't talk about having cheap memory.

Maybe when the P4 becomes an option at the $100 pricerange we can consider that.

That's why Intel is waiting for an SDR platform. No reason to release it now. Why save $50 off the system with a $900 processor?

The Athlon might very well cream the P4.

But since there is no platform we can't tell.

When Intel gets around to sending us a P4 to look at (they said they didnt' have enough the first time around!!) then I'll try to do some stuff with the FSB to see how much it is actually affected by the bandwidth and how much is the CPU.

but there is a limit to what we can find with those kinds of tests. We just get trends and such. Maybe plugging into some statistical plots we can guess where it will be but it really doesn't matter in the first place.

Just testing the CPU is useless. Its like somebody trying to clock the memory of a GeForce card down to 133MHz SDR so they can compare it with a TNT card. Just doesn't happen.

But like the GeForce, they released a 'cut down' version when it became financially beneficial, like Intel will do with the P4

*shrug*

Eric
 
Well, someone beat me to the P4 benches with just one stick of memory. As I predicted (not like it was any great prediction), the P4 kinda stinks in bandwidth intensive apps, including Q3A. Just want to point everyone to these benches found at Ace's Hardware.

http://www.aceshardware.com/

Post your thoughts here about these benchmarks.
 
Comments? Well DUH. Who would cripple a P4 even more. The P4 has a core with alot of promise, and a platform, that is good unless you are stupid and cripple it(like those benchmarks).
 
About calling that a fair challange, its not. You should test what both platforms are at their best.
 
Its interesting to see but its about what we expected I guess.

Note: This means that a P4 platform with DDR might not perform nearly as well as a DRDRAM platform unless they can get some 128-bit wide memory interfaces. That negates the price advantage over DRDRAM and adds scalability troubles.

hmmm
Rambus here to stay? *sigh*

Eric
 
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