The 1ghz you get from the athlon would outperform the 1ghz from the p4, so your comparison is not valid.
Now a 1.33ghz tbred(1500+) could reliably hit 2ghz this is about a 55% increase, most 1.6a's can hit 2.4 reliably, this also is about a 55% increase.
While no one disagrees the p4's overclocking is better, the situation you presented actually would be relativly equal in overclockability.(btw the 2ghz athlon would smoke the 2.4ghz p4, and cost less).
1 GHz from 1.4 compared to 1 GHz from 1.6 isn't a huge difference in terms of performance increase, 71% vs 63%. Although yes, the point is conceded.
However, your example is quite incorrect. Of the sites that have tried a t-bred overclock, mostly with extreme cooling (such as watercooling or even a vapchill), 2 GHz was reached maybe 4/7 of the time (according to the initial 7 reviews I read). With the newer steppings, let's just give it that it can reach 2 GHz with air cooling and be relatively stable except for the few 20% that may not gain that much with all the voltage increases you want (so long as it doesn't kill the CPU). Of the 1.6a's I've seen, very few have been limited at 2.4 GHz. Some people have stopped there due to limitations in FSB, motherboard settings, or memory limitations but most have gotten 2.6 or higher with voltages of 1.6+ vcore (although below 1.75).
The scalability is of course great, but I would like somebody to prove me where other ,than the pipeline, does it make the scaling better! I mean we say it was designed to ramp in clock speeds, but saying that, to me, means there are many things contributing in the NetBurst core that made it have this attribute. So someone prove me that other than twice the pipeline length, something else or other things help. Therefore no I am not saying that if Athlons are twice less clocked, they would still outperform a twice higher clocked P4. I was saying the Athlons will die out at half the P4's dying clock speed. P4s by then will obviously have a high IPC, so a 6GHZ P4 would definitly be a powerhouse. How will AMD compete? I wish I knew, but such clock speed scaling being open, and the possibility to add IPC without sacrificing clock speed, or very little, is a brilliant idea I wonder why AMD doesn't just go for it, even if it takes time to design, at least they have a prototype on the horizon, to strike back.
There is really no way to directly derive the max scalability exactly based on pipeline length of the integer pipelines. There are far too many variables such as heat, cooling, processing technology, transistor size, materials used to make the CPU. However, there will come a point where no matter how good some of those are, you still won't be able to scale much higher.
As for the P4's scalability, all the pipelines on the design was extended. The FP pipelines were extended, the integer pipelines were extended, the L1 caches were reduced and a trace cache was added which removed (arguably) the need for heavy duty (which would slow down scalability) decoding units.
i dunno about u but id MUCH rather own a 3GHz chip that outperforms a 6GHz chip thats designed for the same platform AKA x86 architecture..........only cuz u THAN know the people designing those things are VERY skilled......
The difference is, the Athlon at 3 GHz would not perform better, or even near a 6 GHz P4. Of course, either of these are farther than any of the current designs could hope to reach on the current manufacturing process and steppings, but 6 GHz is a pretty low feasible goal for the P7 core (used in the P4) while no matter how much you revise the K7 core, I doubt you'll get much higher than 3 GHz. Although it may get there and maybe even a bit more.
The point was not that in order to gain scalability, you'd have to sacrifice IPC (which is BS to begin with, if it were, no more processors would be designed because with any design that gains in one, you'd loose in the other), but rather, the P7 core design (specifically the P4) is able to gain a better percentage in scalability than it would loose in IPC, which makes it overall a better design than its predecessor (the P6 core in the P3) and arguable better than the K7 design (which seems stuck at below 2.5 GHz, given future revisions and enhancements). As opposed to the P4, which has already been demonstrated by Intel at IDF at 4.1 GHz (watercooled albeit).
This is not true...for starters...the 2200+ holds its own against the 2.53GHz chip....overall the 2.53 is faster....but not in ALL like u said.....the K7 still holds the crown for 3D Rendering software and even some video editing........thanx to the unmatched FPU unit that the Athlon has =)
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1635&p=7" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1635&p=7</A>
The 1.8 held it's own pretty well and managed to beat the 2.4B in a few but the 2.53 is unmatched.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by imgod2u on 08/18/02 04:15 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
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