Athlon v P4 - Overall (AMD probs w/multitasking?)

Dell has never sold AMD based systems, so AMD systems being returned to Dell due to performance is not correct. The only reason any company doesn't sell an AMD based system is because Intel wants it that way.

AMD does not have issues multitasking, its just not as efficient as Intel in it. Just as intel isn't as efficent when it comes to gaming. But the performance loss in both cases is pretty small so it really doesn't matter. The lower amd xps rule in price/performance and intel just rules in overclockablilty. It all depends on what you want. Oh as the above person said, Dell NEVER used AMD. Dell's product quality also seems to be going downhill.

Multi tasking issues? what multitasking issues?
Can i have what you are smoking please! :smile:

Admittedly the P4 has recently got a boost in performance with hyperthreading on the 3.06Ghz cpu but it all depends on what you are doing. In certain situations hyperthreading can even slow things down.

In the end it comes down to having lots of fast efficient ram, a optimised motherboard and a nice fast cpu.

P.S. Dell doesnt sell AMD because intel bribed...errr *caughs* persuaded them with bags of money not to.

I like AMD cauz its fast, cheap, reliable and a well balanced cpu. The P4 has allways had a particular weakness with pure Floating Point Calculation code, of which i use alot of being involved in mollecular modelling.


<b>My Computer is so powerful Suron Desires it and mortal men Covert it, <i>My Precioussssssss</i></b>

Whoever told you this lied to you. They most likely have alterior motives and you should watch your wallet.

<font color=red>
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P4 is a modern K6-2, without software support, it is horrible. Diffference between K6-2 and P4 is, P4 has enough power for gaming without SSE2 optimization, and SSE2 is much more versatile than 3D Now!

<b> "You can put lipstick on a pig, but hey, it's still a pig!" - RobD </b>

>>>When up/down'n files off the net, will there be a performance difference?

When uploading or downloading files - I doubt the processor is going to be your bottleneck anyhow...

they both (intel and amd) do exactly the samething.

Dell has never sold an AMD system. There are NO issues with AMD CPU's other than heat. multitasking is an operating system term and not a cpu term. CPU's function in hertz. if it is a 1.4ghz processor it operates at 1.4ghz. The OS handles all of that.



Life is irrelivent and irrational.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=9933" target="_new"> My Rig </A>

yeah and what about the heat of the AMD's is it only a real issue if you overclock?

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000355

Like on this the so well know Athlon FPU get smash again.

Just next to the lab and the bunker you will find the marketing departement.

AMD chips do not have heat issues that I'm aware of. When buying any CPU, intel or AMD, you buy a cooling device that is recommended for it. Any retail boxed CPU you buy at a store, or any system you buy from a retailer will come with the appropriate cooling device, which consists of a heatsink/fan.

Someone has told you wise tales about AMD CPU's, which is really sad in my opinion. Both are reputable companies with quality products. One is a huge conglomerate and the other is barely afloat, but still is managing to release quality products at competitive prices. I would forget the misinformation that was fed to you and buy a system that has what you want at the price you want, regardless of the company that made its CPU.

Heat is an issue no matter what CPU you overclock.

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I would hardly say that building a multi-billion $$ fab facility where they can produce 1 million processors a week is "barely afloat".  

Heat is/was a big issue with the process in emergency situations, such as when the cooling unit falls/breaks off (for whatever reason--shipping, etc) for the AMD processors. I do not know if they have resolved this with the more recent productions.

Because a company doesn't have a speedy upgrade path to high megahertz doesn't mean it isn't a working viable company. Sometimes silence from a company means they are working harder behind the scenes to produce something better in the long run. I've seen this an overabundant number of times from various companies.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Jimbo99 on 01/29/03 11:14 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

Thanks I will remember that the next time I run 3D Resistive Magnetohydrodynamics Plasma Simulation

<font color=red>The solution may be obvious, but I can't see it for the smoke coming off my processor.</font color=red>

Considering this was taken STRAIGHT from that link....



I wonder now...si it REALLY that almighty FPU that got smashed juin?? Or the fact that the benchamrk used utilized a LOT of bandwidth and SSE2 coding..????

Disable SSE2 on the P4 see hwo well it does in comparision to the Athlon FPU that gets "smashed again"....

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>

That's not a pure test of fpu.

<font color=red>The solution may be obvious, but I can't see it for the smoke coming off my processor.</font color=red>

Exactly! =)

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>

I don't purport to have all the answers but there are some differing results in more practical applications. Why is the XP2800+ faster in <A HREF="http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000329" target="_new">ScienceMark 2.0 Primordia</A> which is an fpu intensive test.

Ace's Hardware says with Primordia "<b><i>the FPU unit is simply occupied all the time."</i></b> Here the XP2800+ beats the 3GHz P4 w/ hyperthreading.

<font color=red>The solution may be obvious, but I can't see it for the smoke coming off my processor.</font color=red>

This thread is gettin sidetracked.

<b>My Computer is so powerful Sauron Desires it and mortal men Covet it, <i>My Precioussssssss</i></b>

Yea, whole different subject at this point.

<<<The only reason any company doesn't sell an AMD based system is because Intel wants it that way.>>>
wrong the reason our company stays away from amd systems(we sell the on request) is cause they have more problems support wise(when we sell intel we sell intel boards).

<<<P4 is a modern K6-2, without software support, it is horrible. Diffference between K6-2 and P4 is, P4 has enough power for gaming without SSE2 optimization, and SSE2 is much more versatile than 3D Now!>>>
ur obviously retarted. the k6-2 had terrible chipset support, ran hot as hell, and was on the edge of stability(my k6-2 500 had to run at 2.4v to run stable +.2 over stock).

I regularly find myself running a quantum simulation/ rendering something in 3d s max, playing a game like cs, running kazaa, mirc, aim, a bunch of other stuff and everything runs fine. Whoever told u that has no idea what they're talking about, and as stated, dell never sold amd systems due to an agreement made with intel.

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
- Mario Andretti

I wanted to say, FPU and Software supportwise, P4 and K6-2 has similarities. Yes, it's true that P4 has much better chipsets compared to K6-2 and overclocks much better. But my K6-2 450 MHz was 100% stable at default 2.2V on a Gigabyte GA-5AA mobo (ali aladin V chipset). But it din't overclock a bit

<b> "You can put lipstick on a pig, but hey, it's still a pig!" - RobD </b>

well thats a lot of help guys thx...(lack of comp knowledge leaves me totally confused)

peace,
-=i3lue}{orneT=-

what is this K6-2 you guys are talking about?


peace,
-=<font color=blue>i3lue}{orneT</font color=blue>=-

LoL....you've never heard of the AMD K6-2 ??

Ok..Athlon's are K7 based...correct?? 7th Generation x86 by AMD...

K6 was th generation x86 by AMD......Original K6 competed with Pentium MMX.....K6-2 competed with Pentium 2...K6-III originally was supposed to compete with Pentium III but than Athlon (K7) came out so it directly competed with the Pentium III and now the P4 etc...

anyways the K6-2 was the first processor on the market to have a 100Mhz FSB.....very first processor to have any kind of Streaming SIMD Extensions(3D Now! and later Enhanced 3D Now! on Athlon's and K6-2+ and K6-III+) and it was AMD's processor to extend the life of the Socket 7 platform and it did so VERY well.....it didnt have the greatest FPU unit but 3D Now! more than made up for it when running applicationa that utilized 3D Now! (much like the P4 is like today with SSE2) infact games ran much better on K6-2 and especially K6-III systems than there Pentium 2 counterparts when 3D Now! was used..like Quake 2 etc.....amazing what there awesome instructions can do to speed up performance of a harware component....

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>

Um 3D Now is a integer extension like MMX was, SSE and SSE2 are completely different extensions used to branch predictions and to extrapolate and execute more efficient FPU calcs. 3D Now Professional is nothing more than poorly utilized SSE extensions added to the existing 3D Now extension library. Reason being is the Athlons pre-fetch never changed when they moved SSE into the K7 core.

3D Now also wasn’t that great it was difficult to integrate into the existing code since you had to make a call to 3D Now library, which isn’t how MMX SSE and SSE2 work. The silicon is smart enough on the Pentium line to do the decode shifting and execution without the need of an extra library. Personally I can’t see any application that utilizing 3D Now being very effective since it has to constantly call to memory for the 3D Now library to give it further instructions. Lots of overhead it was and is, since I remember those benchmarks of Quake2 and the original Unreal, UT and even Decent Free space and they weren’t that good. But fan boys remeber things differently that the rest of us I guess.

-Jeremy


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Spud the Palomino came "bundled" with SSE AND hardware data prefetch, was that not enough for SSE to function normally if not better than the P3's SSE?

Also, THG's tests, showed that 3dNow was able to give a small performance boost in Quake 2, albeit not much.
<A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/19990809/athlon-25.htm..." target="_new">http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/19990809/athlon-25.htm...;/A>
Here in this old benchmark you can see the small boost per clock.
Ahh how I loved that test article back then, especially the FPU. :tongue:

--
This post is brought to you by Eden, on a Via Eden, in the garden of Eden. :smile: <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Eden on 02/01/03 06:57 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

There was no difference in the prefetch ability of the K7 core. The existing core changes allowed for data prefectch improvements, but it had nothing to do with SSE.

As seen <A HREF="http://www.emulators.com/docs/pentium_4.htm" target="_new">here</A>. Go down to "Failed to Meet Expectations" He states very clearly.

-Jeremy

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So where did the actual IPC boost come from?
It had a good 10% boost per clock in almost every benchmark, and even more when SSE was available for use.

--
This post is brought to you by Eden, on a Via Eden, in the garden of Eden. :smile:

Just to clarify, 3dNow! did include FP SIMD extensions. It also fixed the poor integer instruction set that was MMX (albeit not much). But you are right, 3dNow! was a pretty poor SIMD implementation compared to SSE2. It had no vector rotation or shift operations as I recall, no bitshift operations, etc. Which is among one of the reasons why the strong x87 FPU in the P2 was chosen to be used in most games asside from 3dNow!. The other reason was of course, that AMD owned close to 3% of the market and Intel 96%. I wonder who software designers will choose to follow.....
It's good AMD learned and recognized who had dominance over the software developers and followed Intel with using SSE. Now we are seeing more and more software utilizing SSE and many professional-level software utilizing SSE2.

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.

Have you heard about GoGo NoCoda Encoder? Beleive it or not, this MP3 Encoder gave me <b> about 400% </b> performance boost with 3D Now! enabled with my older K6-2 450 MHz system. With my current current 1 GHz Duron, this app gives me around 95% times performance boost. With SSE, it gets about 100% performance boost. But these results should not be taken seriously, because this MP3 Encoder is based on very old LAME MP3 code, and produces unacceptable quality MP3 files.

<b> "You can put lipstick on a pig, but hey, it's still a pig!" - RobD </b>

I did say personally...

-Jeremy

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<font color=red>Original post had been updated, pls see..thx.</font color=red>

peace,
-=<font color=blue>i3lue}{orneT</font color=blue>=-

Exactly my point.....3D Now! was NOT just for integer improvements.....it had SIMD Implementations......i remember readign abotu it when the K6-2 came out.....very kewl stuff for its time.....

See than after that with Enhanced 3D Now! was what was called "MMX+" or "Enhanced MMX" or "AMD MMX+" infact u can still see these things in SiSoft Sandra.......

I know on my brothers old K6-2 400 system i remember i was able to select '3D Now!' as an option in Winamp for it to use that instruction set to decode the MP3's and i remember it ran much better with it enabled....later versions auto detected the best instruction set available and used it......

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>

as far as ur new update.....

with Intel u have till whenever they stop releasign chips for Socket 478...

and for AMD u have till they stop making chips for Socket A.....

Barton is around the corner for AMD and i see prolly another revision of the K7 hitting Socket A b4 its done...

as for Intel who knows.....Pentium 4 has already been on 2 different platforms.....and there were 3 versions of Socket 370.......

Stability though thats a good one..seeign how either system will prove to be unstable if paired with crappy parts (crappy PSU, crappy RAM, crappy chipset, crappy MB Manufacturer, etc.) so really its ur decision..personaly id say go for the AMD.....more specifically to avoid any ASUS only probs. get the EPOX 8RDA+ nForce 2 motherboard and a 333MHz FSB Athlon or even wait till the 512Kb L2 cache 333Mhz FSB Athlons r out (Barton's) which supposedly will be readily available in 2 weeks......

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?id=13597" target="_new">-MeTaL RoCkEr</A>