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Processors
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
Hey there,
Not really an Internet query. More a Computing one.
Is it true that the two leading manufacturers of processor chips - Pentium and Athlon - measure the Mhz and Ghz differently?
So, would it be true that an 800Mhz Pentium processor is *NOT* equivalent to an 800Mhz Athlon processor, and therefore they work at a different speeds?
Thanks!
Not really an Internet query. More a Computing one.
Is it true that the two leading manufacturers of processor chips - Pentium and Athlon - measure the Mhz and Ghz differently?
So, would it be true that an 800Mhz Pentium processor is *NOT* equivalent to an 800Mhz Athlon processor, and therefore they work at a different speeds?
Thanks!
0
Comments
Depending on what you want to do depends on the processor needed the Intel ones have a different set of comands on them to the AMD ones and it`s not just down to speed now.. i.e the pentium 4 calculates floating points faster than the equivalent AMD and thus should be quicker at processing applications.....
I have an Athon 800 Mhz in my main PC and a Pentium 4 1.1 Ghz in my laptop and the pentium is quicker with things like Excel and Word... but the AMD seems better with games and graphics progs...
Bench marking tests have shown that the Athlon ones are, overall slightly faster than the Intel processors...but not. I personally prefer AMD.
Hope this makes a bit of sense.
So whats there to say, yes the main companies for processors are Intel and AMD, Intel make Pentiums and Celerons (for home users) and AMD make Athlons and Durons (even tho Durons have now been dropped for the future)
Intel's Pentium 4's work on whats called 'NetBurst Micro-Architecture' and have a 512kb L2 cache size. AMD Athlon XP's work on 'QuantiSpeed Architecture' only have a 384KB (exclusive) cache but process more operations per clock cycle...
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_756_3734^3759,00.html
Bluezman is right, they process tasks differently and some programs are specifically designed to take advantage of the architecture of each individual chip... the benchmark testing is quite interesting as they come up with different results for different compaines... so who is the truely faster company can never be fully justified.
Recent testing also came out with saying that a AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (or 1.6Ghz if we're talking speed) can outpreform Intel's also operating at 1.9Ghz and that was on industry standard benchmarks
As for Megahertz and speed, having a higher MHz processor doesn't mean your going to get better system performance, so true processor performance can be determinded by a combination of the amount of work being done per clock cycle (IPC) and the operating frequency of the processor, in other words the calculation:
Performance = Work x Speed (Mhz)
And thats the way AMD rate their chips... I do prefer them, haven't touched a Pentium since the original one and have been K6 to Duron and Athlon XP since
Ohhh, and an interesting article I read on Intel Celerons recently which might interest people, showing that since they've changed the cache size on the new Celerons, even the older Intel Celerons almost twice as slow out preform the new ones:
http://www.pcworld.co.nz/PCWorld/PCW.nsf/UNID/63D4D9779742F451CC256BE1007849DD?OpenDocument&Highlight=2,celeron
Bit of food for thought there
As for what that means to you... well, it could mean anything.
If you want to know what to buy, go for athlon, Simply put, you get more performace for your $.
Worth noting that (justin) that not all of the pentiums after the "first batch" (ie pre MMX) were crap.
The Celerons were absolute bargins if you chose your motherboard right, cos they could be relyably overclocked to stupid proportions.
One of the main reason people like AMD so much as well is the overclocking, many of the motherboards come with the software to sucessfully overclock the processors, however the big problem here can boil down to warrenty when attempting overclocking, processors such as the AMD Athlons have a maximum heat tolerance of 90-95C which is pretty damn high but overclocking can burn the chip out or the fan may just not be able to keep the processor cool enough and hense burnout.
Not to put anyone off at all, my Athlon 1.2Ghz is running on 1.46Ghz respectively and has been for sometime... just keep in mind that chip burnouts do happen and you could risk the warrenty, just read the small print on the handbook and shop sales small print when buying the processor. (Someone I knew didn't and we couldn't get anything done about it when he overclocked it)
Same as I class all x86's together. OK, they were pretty different (jump from 286 to 386 being the biggest), but i still put them together.
You could say i'm classing by marketing rather than spec.
If you're serious about overclocking there are some pretty cheap water cooling systems out there at the moment. Not only does it greatly decrease the risk of burnout, but also is completly quiet.
Bit of a pointless post really, but this was the only thread in the top 5 that didn't have me as the last poster... so, here i am.