The Single Core Days

[Oxaqata]

For the first time I decided to have a very good look at some of the Toms hardware benchmarks. I was surprised to see that all the Single Core AMD's were extremely close and even beaten most of the time by Pentiums. I'd come to believe that AMD held the crown by a mile back then but this says very differently.

Can anyone explain what I'm seeing wrong??? :Q

 

[theprodigalrebel]

You have been living under a rock since last February's leaked benchmarks, that's what

BTW, they aren't called Pentiums now. It's Core 2 Duo.

 

[Oxaqata]

Nonono you misunderstand me!
Take this for example
OGG Encoding Run

The Pentiums everyone hated, flatten all of the AMD and arent far behind C2D. I was under the assumption that back when Single Core was the thing, that AMD trampled all the Pentiums underfoot.

 

[Brunnis]

Well, people definitely exaggerated the Athlon64's lead over the P4. The fact is that the performance difference wasn't much to speak of outside of games. Also, the performance difference in games often vanished once you increased resolution and details anyway. People got a little excited over the gaming performance of the Athlon64 and performance in other areas seemed to be forgotten.

That said, the sheer amount of power consumed by the Pentium 4, compared to its performance, made the CPU look quite weak. Personally, I didn't even consider the P4 when a CPU that performed the same used one third of the power.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

AMD never had any sort of commanding lead with the A64 in terms of general processing performance. It was factors such as great gaming performance, overclocking headroom, and less power consumed and heat produced (especially compared to Prescott) that helped AMD gain major favor amongst enthusiasts. It was the X2 vs PD where AMD saw clear performance advantage largely due to Pentium losing it's HT crutch as well as the A64/X2's architecture already favoring multi processing. Of course once it was greatly suspected/known that AMD would dominate the advent of dualcore processing, that was all the more reason to go with an AMD singlecore platform (s939) due to future upgrade paths.

I think it was several of these factors together that helped to establish the A64 as the clear king of single core, not just general processing performance where the P4 still excelled (and still does to this day) in niches.

 

[Oxaqata]

Yea the heat is I hear very bad, though my fathers Pentium 4 3Ghz Prescott runs both very quiet and cool on a stock fan.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Pentium 4s were widely held to be better in media encoding, while Athlon 64s were actually competitive in a number of other benchmarks (and dominated in games). For encoding, overclocked Northwoods were the way to go for a long time.

It should come as no surprise that Netburst CPUs did well, and still do well, in some encoding benchmarks, especially considering how hard Intel pushed to get people to use Netburst-friendly compilers and make Netburst-friendly code optimizations. A lot of software out there is still probably optimized for either Netburst or P6, not that that stops K8s and/or Core 2s from doing well running such apps.

Also, a lot of Tom's benchmarks from back then heavily favored Netburst CPUs (or so it is thought by many). Tom's Hardware took major hits to its reputation as result.

 

[Oxaqata]

The AMD 64 3800+ and the Pentium 4 EE were the top of the line competitors back in the day?

CD2

Maybe its because its a mcuh newer game, Iono

 

[insomnio]

You also forgot a key factor in buying decision, price.

 

[Oxaqata]

hehehe yes Intel/stores are still trying to peddle 3.6Ghz Pentium 4s for double the price of an E6300 (here in Australia at least)

 

[DrMrLordX]

Originally posted by: Oxaqata
The AMD 64 3800+ and the Pentium 4 EE were the top of the line competitors back in the day?

CD2

Maybe its because its a mcuh newer game, Iono

A few points:

1). The A64 3800+ was not a competitor for the various Extreme Edition P4s . . . the FX chips were. The FX-57 was a 2.8 ghz processor unlike the 3800+ (2.4 ghz), and the FX-57 had 1 meg of l2 cache (unlike the 3800+ which only has 512k).

Secondly, newer games that are multithreaded to take advantage of dual-core processors actually benefit a bit from Hyperthreading. There were virtually no games back in the A64/P4 days that were multithreaded well enough to utilize the second virtual processor, but newer games like Call of Duty 2 are multithreaded.

If you really want some perspective on what things were like back in "the old days", have a look at this:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2456&p=6

In addition to winning all the gaming benchmarks, the FX-57 won 3d rendering, all the workstation application benchmarks . . . hell it won everything except the Roxio Videowave bench and the three Sysmark benches.

Let's try not to revise history shall we?