I feel that amd makes a much better processor than intel, but again that is just my opinion. I have had heard many complaints about intel, and little to none about amd. Again, I just like amd as a company better than intel.

If you are willing to put up with the loud, low toned cooling system for your AMD then go for it, that''s all I have to say from experience. I have an AMD Athlon 1.2GHz and it is too loud to leave on overnight or through a good movie on TV.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
I would like to know what the technical difference is, honestly.

You really wanna know? The down and dirty goes like this:

Intel's P4 has this huge 21-stage (21? 22? something like that) pipeline for processing data. The benefits of this is that a larger pipeline is the key for bumping the clock speed up faster, which is why the P4 is already clocked in at 2.1GHz. The downside is when the processor screws up its branch prediction and has to flush out the entire pipeline and start again. ouch Luckily it has very good branch prediction, but mistakes still happen. The second (bad?) thing about the P4 is it's coupling to RDRAM (Rambus). Not only is this memory type twice the cost of DDR, it's not even worth the cost right now. This is because although RDRAM has a nice fat bandwidth pipe, the P4 is not yet going fast enough (3GHz will start to tax it) to make it worthwhile. Right now, DDR RAM will feed a P4 sufficiently, and Intel only recently released a P4 DDR chipset. When the P4 gets faster, DDR will choke and RDRAM will be worth the cost - but not yet.

Over on AMD's side, they are sticking to a much smaller stage pipeline (I forget the exact number... 4-8?) which is why Athlons have only reached 1.67GHz in speed. Since AMD supports DDR RAM and has supported it in the past, it has become the top consumer CPU due to cheap costs compared to a similar Intel system.

Some other noted differences are that the Intel P4 Northwood chip runs at 2.1GHz top speed (so far) and is made with a .13 micron process and uses copper interconnects. This significantly reduces power consumption and heat output. The AthlonXP is still at .18 microns and a top speed of 1.67GHz. However AMD's new chip, Thouroughbred, will drop doen to a .13 micron process, so hopefully a lot of AMD heat problems will be releived

In short, Intel is an industrial CPU best used in servers and for people who do a lot of content-creation (Photoshop, AutoCAD, Premier, etc). AMD is the best consumer CPU (right now) due to cost and speed - the AthlonXP 2000+ (1.67GHz)holds its own admirably next to the P4 2.1GHz in general tests.

I can only say that the thing that ticks me off most is people who can't see past the clockspeed. This is a common thing, as evidenced by AMDs AthlonXP marketing scheme (the 2000+ is clocked at 1.67GHz but performs like an Intel 2GHz). Clockspeed ain't all that. You also have memory bottlenecks (try using a P4 with SDRAM and you'll see what I mean), instruction sets, chip architecture.... always look past the clock speed.

quote:
If you are willing to put up with the loud, low toned cooling system for your AMD then go for it, that's all I have to say from experience. I have an AMD Athlon 1.2GHz and it is too loud to leave on overnight or through a good movie on TV.

Get a fanbus installed so that you can turn down your fans when you aren't using your PC.

_________________________________________________________________

Drew Sikora
A.K.A. Gaiiden

ICQ #: 70449988
AOLIM: DarkPylat

Blade Edge Software
Staff Member, GDNet
Public Relations, Game Institute

3-time Contributing author, Game Design Methods , Charles River Media (coming GDC 2002)
Online column - Design Corner at Pixelate

NJ IGDA Chapter - NJ developers unite!! [Chapter Home | Chapter Forum]

/me applauds

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chain=chain->chain;

Athlon architecture is ways better designed than p3 one.
AMD''s first k7 had a clock speed of 500mhz, and now they are still selling a cpu featuring almost the same architecture at 1.67Ghz.
One of the reasons why p4 release has been accelerated is that p3 architecture didn''t allowed intel to keep up the pace in clock speed race.
From a technical point of view, Athlon performs more ipc than any p3-based cpu. That''s another reason why k7 is superior to p3.

As for p4 vs athlonxp, things are less clear.
AthlonXP has still some advantage, allowing amd to sell 1.67Ghz cpus with a 1.900+ mark, but if you look at the architecture, p4 can get a lot faster in ghz race. p4 fpu is slower than a p3 fpu because intel had to accelerate its release, but next step will improve fpu performance. SSE2 could help p4 to reduce the gap, but everybody knows the time needed for developers (and programming tools vendors) to support new instructions is 12-18 months.

p4 is the base of upcoming intel cpu series and amd isn''t going to push Athlonxp as x86-64 is scheduled for q4 2002.

My 2 eurocents:
k7 vs p3 = k7.
k7 vs p4 = p4.

AMD are the best!

I just thought that I might add that Hz aren''t everything a 2GHz pentium performs (in multiple benchmarks) worse then a 1.6GHz Athlon XP... it''s the same that applied to Pentium and 486 a Pentium 75 were faster then a DX4-100MHz even though the DX4 had 25 more MHz... my 0.02$

// Shadows

That''s what I thought: the processor (be it P4 or AthlonXP) can go so fast it screws up and drowns itself.

Now you can see Nintendo''s logic in choosing their GameCube architecture.

And I dunno on the clock speed thing. I admit, it''s hard to get past it, but here''s something that works: Consider that when one CPU moves at some fraction faster than another CPU, that fraction is spent screwing the whole thing up.

>>That's what I thought: the processor (be it P4 or AthlonXP) can go so fast it screws up and drowns itself.<<

reminds me of the oric (from the early 80's) IIRC an ad(edit ad has only 1 d) went something like its only got 4kb rom + 16kb ram (thus less likely to contain bugs)

on the cpu issue if u do a lot of floating point calculations get an athlon otherwise get a p4 (money concerns aside) personally i would go for an athlon (my interests are lots + lots of fp calculations)

http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/gotterdammerung.html

Edited by - zedzeek on February 2, 2002 2:57:04 AM

Well as far as im considered , it is really the WAY you use your PC that defines which processor is best for you. Pentium always has been more of a multitask processor, i would give amd more credit to certain single applications. I myself own a Pentium 4 1,7 ghz, it only needs a small cooling and hardly makes noises , but still gives you the full power. Amd needs large coolings and it''s always a bad thing if your processor generates a lot of heat. Since my t.v once overheated and then almost catched fire *smoke came out* I''ve been a real fan of machines that are COOL :cool: Besides if your not a maniak like i am and buy the latest processor immidiatly then you can get a nice amd or pentium for an affordable price. Above that sometimes the distinction between the two brand names are hard to distinguese. I myself for instance am always multitask :d , for instance i almost always have SETI (search for Aliens) on , and the pentium 4 does a real good job finding ET. So i like Pentium. Besides i lived on well-fare before that and could STILL buy a P4 , so it''s not that bad i think. I mean i have it for months and it still works satisfactory so...