Which is faster? P4 3ghzHT (s478) or Athlon 64 3500+ (OC to 2.3, s939)?

[jiffylube1024]

The P4 is "faster". Back when the A64 ruled, Anadtech compared the single core A64 versus the slower P4 with hyperthreading. The end result was that even though the A64 was theoretically faster, the P4 ended up being faster in real world testing. The reason was because the Windows scheduler handled tasking better when it thought their were two cores versus a single core. (I really wish I could find that article but I couldn't. Sorry.)

So as much as I like the A64, the P4 is the better chip, not because of any inherent superiority, but because of windows inefficiencies.

Here's Anand's Athlon64 review, where an Athlon64 3200+ (@ 2 GHz) on the slower Socket 754 platform trades blows with the P4 3.0C (socket 478):

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1164/1

An A64 3500+ on Socket 939 will destroy the 3 GHz P4 w/ HT.

 

[evolucion8]

Indeed, along with the EEs, so that makes :

2.4C
2.6C
2.8C
3.0C
3.06 (an oddball)
3.2C
3.2EE
3.4EE (rare?)

AFAIK, that's all the HT 478 chips.

There's more,

2.8E
3.0E
3.2E
3.4E
3.4C which I currently own

I owned the 3.40GHz EE and it indeed was based on the Gallatin core, a repackaged Xeon CPU with 2MB of L3 based on 130nm and had the same 20 stage pipelines as Northwood, basically a Northwood with L3 cache, the same chip was used for the Pentium 4 3.2GHz EE.

Also I currently own the 3.40GHz Northwood processor which is also rare since Intel was boosting Prescott at that time and trying to get rid of the more expensive to make Northwood. But definitively the Athlon 64 3500+ will be faster, but the margin difference will be smaller now that it was back then, thanks specially to Multi Threading, gap has closed somewhat against the Athlon 64 which has better IPC performance.

 

[cparker]

I have several machines using the a64 3500+. Currently they are running Vista 32bit OS as well as Windows 7 64 bit OS. I have 2 gigs of ram in each and they do just fine with the kind of applications you mentioned. I should add that each has a graphics card that can handle Aero. The cpu on Vista 32 gets a WEI of something around 4.3, by the way.

 

[DrMrLordX]

There's more,

2.8E
3.0E
3.2E
3.4E
3.4C which I currently own

The E-designate CPUS aren't Northwoods, however; those are Prescotts.

 

[evolucion8]

The E-designate CPUS aren't Northwoods, however; those are Prescotts.

I know, I prefer Northwoods, at higher MHz the performance difference is small.

 

[Scali]

I know, I prefer Northwoods, at higher MHz the performance difference is small.

I prefer Prescotts, the first ever x86 on which I ran an x64 version of Windows was a Prescott
But I don't think any of the socket 478 Prescotts allow 64-bit (bios/chipset-related incompatibilities I suppose). So in that case you might aswell use a Northwood

 

[borisvodofsky]

My opteron 144 was 2.95 ghz maxed, that thing felt like a 5ghz P4 .

I had a 4.1ghz Northwood, which felt Almost the same.

The p4 did feel snappier like the other posts said.

But when it came time for gaming, there was a 10-25% difference in favor of the athlon

 

[Arkaign]

My opteron 144 was 2.95 ghz maxed, that thing felt like a 5ghz P4 .

I had a 4.1ghz Northwood, which felt Almost the same.

The p4 did feel snappier like the other posts said.

But when it came time for gaming, there was a 10-25% difference in favor of the athlon

Yeah I think when comparing approximate equals : eg 3.4ghz P4 vs. Athlon 64 3500+, the HT P4 will be a slightly better platform for say a Win7 PC for general internet/music/media. Games have gotten much better at using multithreading over time as well. At 3ghz though, I think that's not enough for the P4 to overcome the performance gap of a 3500+. A lot of people look back at the P4 era with really strange ideas. The AMD64 stuff wasn't massively better until they really started rolling with the higher-range X2s, and they priced those things through the freaking roof.

I had a PD-805 and clocked it up around 3.8ghz for about $100, when a X2-4200+ was over $600. It was a wonderful performer for the $, and it's odd to think about Intel as a value chip, but there it was. But yeah, earlier AMD64 single-cores traded blows with the P4s, losing in some things and winning in others at the similar price point ranges and ratings (like A64-3000+ vs. P4 3ghz). When P4 ran out of gas, though, AMD64 X2s ran away with unbeatable performance, I'd say 4200+ was beyond any P4/PD, and past that it was all gravy for AMD until C2D came and blew everyone's freaking balls off.

 

[evolucion8]

I prefer Prescotts, the first ever x86 on which I ran an x64 version of Windows was a Prescott
But I don't think any of the socket 478 Prescotts allow 64-bit (bios/chipset-related incompatibilities I suppose). So in that case you might aswell use a Northwood

Yeah, there's no 64-Bit enabled CPU on the S478, that's why I prefer Northwood over Prescott at 3.0GHz and below, Prescott shines as GHz ramps up, but I loved my 3.40GHz Northwood CPU and I will not swap it to Prescott, too much heat dissipation for a marginal improvement of 3-5% in Hyper Threading scenarios and a decrease in gaming performance (Hell, who plays with a Pentium 4 these days??)

 

[nenforcer]

I see people claiming the P4 w/ HT was a snappier desktop PC but I seem to recall Athlon XP and later Athlon 64 PC's performing on par with or better than same era Intel P4's in business benchmarks like Winstone and PCMark.

I think alot of this had to do with nForce systems having the first dual channel memory controller and DASP logic. The later Athlon 64 machines were the first processors to incorporate the memory controller on die, correct?

AMD at this time and still to this day performs as well or better in gaming.

It was only in the media encoding / compression / encryption tests that the P4's superior ALU came out to shine over AMD in computationally intensive tasks.

Although I haven't used a whole lot of P4 systems other than some cheap LGA775 Northwood / Prescott (i915?) Dell's at my job the nForce 2/3/4 era systems always felt the most responsive to me.

 

[Scali]

I see people claiming the P4 w/ HT was a snappier desktop PC but I seem to recall Athlon XP and later Athlon 64 PC's performing on par with or better than same era Intel P4's in business benchmarks like Winstone and PCMark.

Problem is that you can't really measure 'snappiness'.

In the server world there's a similar scenario...
They are more interested in the 'average response time' than in the actual performance.
For example... say you run a website that serves maybe 1000 requests per second.
Now, you can either have a system that can handle many requests simultaneously, or one that handles them all sequentially.
The first system may be slower in the absolute sense that it takes longer to process all 1000 requests. But the average response time will be rather good because it can run multiple requests at the same time. It doesn't take very long for a slot to open up for your request to be processed. It doesn't matter that a lot of other requests are still processing at the same time, you don't have to wait for them.

The second system will have to queue up all requests, and if you're in the front of the queue, you may get very good response time... but if you're at the back of the queue, you get a very poor response time, because you have to wait until EVERY request before you is complete.

Sometimes people choose the system that is 'slower' in the absolute sense, but gives a better response for your website on average. It's nicer if all users have to wait ~10 ms for the page to load, than it would be to have one user get the page in 1 ms, and another having to wait for 100 ms.
In the first case, nobody will feel that the site is slow.
In the second case, some will feel the site is fast, but others will complain that the site is too slow for them.

But there's no easy way to measure that.

 

[SonicIce]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-90nm_12.html

 

[Obsoleet]

Yeah I think when comparing approximate equals : eg 3.4ghz P4 vs. Athlon 64 3500+, the HT P4 will be a slightly better platform for say a Win7 PC for general internet/music/media. Games have gotten much better at using multithreading over time as well. At 3ghz though, I think that's not enough for the P4 to overcome the performance gap of a 3500+. A lot of people look back at the P4 era with really strange ideas. The AMD64 stuff wasn't massively better until they really started rolling with the higher-range X2s, and they priced those things through the freaking roof.

I had a PD-805 and clocked it up around 3.8ghz for about $100, when a X2-4200+ was over $600. It was a wonderful performer for the $, and it's odd to think about Intel as a value chip, but there it was. But yeah, earlier AMD64 single-cores traded blows with the P4s, losing in some things and winning in others at the similar price point ranges and ratings (like A64-3000+ vs. P4 3ghz). When P4 ran out of gas, though, AMD64 X2s ran away with unbeatable performance, I'd say 4200+ was beyond any P4/PD, and past that it was all gravy for AMD until C2D came and blew everyone's freaking balls off.

This is the best, and most accurate explanation (from my recollection of history) that I've seen in this thread.

Cliffnotes
P4 (non-Willamette) > AXP/A64-singlecore
P4 < Ax2

P4's stretched a longtime in history from Willamette to Prescott, and once Northwood hit it was worth getting in my opinion until the X2 Athlons. The Athlons were generally cheaper though, which is why I used them instead of P4s. I have 1 P4 system, which is a SDR Willamette, having an Intel chipset though, it's still stable (runs 24/7) to this day for the past 10 years or so never being turned off.

When talking hardware this old, especially if it's Nvidia vs Intel, the chipset makes all the difference. Intel chipsets are the best.

I would trade my Athlon FX55 rig for any Extreme Edition rig if someone wanted to make that trade.

 

[Scali]

My personal favourite is the Pentium XE, especially the 965 variation.
Technically that was the first 'quadcore' x86 processor on the market, even though those were 4 logical cores, not 4 physical cores.

It's a shame they didn't enable HT on more dualcores at the time.

 

[evolucion8]

I liked the Pentium XE, it was able to keep up and outperform slightly in heavy multi threaded scenarios the mighty Athlon X2 4800+ and can match the Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz.

 

[alexruiz]

As much as I liked the Athlon 64s (after all, my emachines M6805 laptop with a clawhammer A64 3000+ stayed with me for over 5 years....) I also suggest the route to sell the parts and buy a dual core setup.

If the OP has a microcenter nearby, he can get an Athlon II X2 240 ("Regor" 2.8 GHz) with a 785g motherboard for less than $70 (mobo free basically). That machine will run circles around the A64 3500+.

Sigh for all those of A64 machines....

Edit:
If the OP can spare $90 bucks, a quad core Athlon II X4 630 is even better. My wife machine is used for the same scenario (web browser, facebook, etc) and it is probably the only machine in the house that uses the 4 cores with something like 15+ firefox / opera tabs. A dual core is defitinely snappier than a single core, and a quad is even more

 

[tweakboy]

The Athlon 64 is faster even at a lower speed. Its 2.6Ghz will beat P4 3Ghz

Why you want to know this anyway.. thanks

God Bless

 

[pmv]

It's like everybody here has a completely blank spot in their mind about this part of history. The Athlon 64 3500+ is superior the P4 in virtually every scenario you could put them in. The Athlon 64 3500+ competed with 3.4 and 3.6Ghz P4 processors very nicely and usually had the nod.

That's absolutely my memory of the time. For a little while Athlon64 was king. I'm open to being proved wrong though.

Also I have bad memories of P4 and its power demands/heat. I still have a prescott core CeleronD PC that I got given for nothing and its the noisiest CPU fan I've ever heard. And I remember having to get a better PSU back when I had a P4 as the main machine (a machine which eventually just gave up and died for reasons I never quite figured out). I don't have positive memories of Pentium4.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Update:

I upgraded the server/routing computer in our front room with the P4 instead of dropping it into my parents place. Turns out the P4 in question was 3.2ghz with HT, but only 512kb L2 cache. I had 1GB of PC3200 laying around and we reused a 9600pro. It replaces a P4 1.8ghz, 512mb PC2100 and the same 9600pro. A faster 40GB HDD is being used than the 30GB in the former build.

How much faster does it feel? At least 5x the usability. The much faster clock and adding in hyper-threading makes this computer feel very snappy under Linux, Fedora 13. Youtube videos don't skip at all, web pages render incredibly faster (waiting 1/4 sec for google as opposed to an actual 3-5 seconds), and general usage is flawless.

 

[ModestGamer]

Not because of Windows inefficiencies, but because HyperThreading allows Windows to handle two threads at the same time (just like a real dualcore), which reduces the average response time for a given thread in the system, which results in a more 'snappy' user experience.
If the CPU can only handle one thread at a time, that's not Windows' fault. Windows has a very decent thread scheduler... but there's only so much you can do with only one thread running at a time.

LOL no its a windows problem. BE had no problem with the BEOS handling lots of threads. Microsoft write inefficient code for user interaction to sell hardware. Code bloat forces upgrades.

duuh.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

LOL no its a windows problem. BE had no problem with the BEOS handling lots of threads. Microsoft write inefficient code for user interaction to sell hardware. Code bloat forces upgrades.

duuh.

I can't stand ignorant posts like this. I'm sure you never written a piece of code and are attacking Windows solely because it is the market leader. Windows is the best desktop OS hands down. Having built a Samba PDC with roaming profiles and a Linux mail server, I have plenty of experience with Linux. It and every other open source OS do not compare IMO.

 

[ModestGamer]

I can't stand ignorant posts like this. I'm sure you never written a piece of code and are attacking Windows solely because it is the market leader. Windows is the best desktop OS hands down. Having built a Samba PDC with roaming profiles and a Linux mail server, I have plenty of experience with Linux. It and every other open source OS do not compare IMO.

windows is a piece of crap and the only reason it got anywhere was be being a better run bussines. not a better OS. I've written and I am writing plenty of code. Windows sucks.

Its like .net. Why ? What was so wrong with vb6 ? Wanna cut the performance of your applications but 50% on the same hardware ?? compile in .net.

Its that simple.

windows sells hardware with code bloat.

I was able to vastly improve my windows 7 install by killing off needless redundant process's and streamling the binary of the kernel in a few places. thanx god I know assembly.

sloppy sloppy code. Its obiously so to becuase the complier optimizations are non existnatn and if you have looked at enough assembly and binary you can see it in the code.

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

I highly doubt you edited the Windows kernel, especially because it is written in C and C++, not assembly. The fact that you are comparing VB6 to .NET clearly shows you are clueless. You probably don't even know what any of the processess that you kill do.

 

[nenforcer]

On Topic:

ScholzPDX,

sounds good I am about to upgrade my Mom from a P3 1GHz i815 Tyan 512MB SDRAM to a P4 3.06GHz w/ HT and 1GB RDRAM on an Intel iD850DEMVR.

I plan to swap it out and see if she ever notices the difference!

 

[OBLAMA2009]

So its pretty simple. With all other variables constant (ram, hdd, etc), which one is faster?This is for my parents build. they only use their computer for Facebook, Pogoonline games, yahoo messenger and youtube. The reason why I ask this is because Yahoo messenger is always open during other operations. And typically its pogo, facebook and yahoo messenger. Would a P4 w/HT be faster? Or should I keep them on my old gaming PC (s939)?

you can get i3 for $99. why not go out and get your parents something like that that is more useable. i know i couldnt go back to using a p4