🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 17:32:11 +0200, "Ari Oppenheimer"
<ak79@iafrica.com> wrote:
>I've noticed that the new AMD Proccessors are call XP 1600, XP 1700, XP 1800
>etc, but the actual speed of the XP 1600 for example is only 1.4 GHz.
>
>Now does this compare to a P4 1.6Ghz or a P4 1.4Ghz.

It's more or less comperable to a P4 at 1.8GHz in most applications.

> Also, consider the fact
>the the P4 runs at a 400Mhz bus. To me it seems as if Intel comes out as the
>sure winner over here. After all it seems as if P4 1.6Ghz is better than AMD
>1.4Ghz,.

The P4 also has only an 8K L1 data cache and ~21K L1 instruction cache
vs. 64K of both for the AMD chips, and the P4 has a very long pipeline
which takes longer to recover from branch misprediction, and the P4
has fewer execution units for both integer and floating point, etc.
etc.  Long story short, there is a LOT to consider here.

What AMD did with their new model number system is to exchange one
meaningless measure of performance (clock speed) with another
meaningless measure of performance (model number).  If you want to
know how fast one chip will be as compared to another, you're best bet
is to check for benchmarks that closely relate to what you use your
computer for most.  Here's some links to a few recent benchmarks:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1543
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000277


>Please let me know if my deduction is right, or should I go for the AMD

As you can probably see from the above benchmarks, there is no
clear-cut winner for every single application out there, in some cases
even the slowest AthlonXPs beat out the very fastest P4s, while in
other applications the opposite is true.

It should also be pointed out that the processor is only one part of
the system, and often a relatively small part when it comes to actual
performance.  If you look at this article:

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000212

You can see that the type of memory used and the motherboard chipset
can have a very serious impact on performance (though the above is
probably the most extreme case of this).  Video cards can also have a
tremendous impact on performance, particularly for games and for
workstation-type 3D graphics.  Hard drive performance is also
extremely important in determining how fast your system will be, and
even things like network cards and sound cards have an impact on the
overall system speed.