alternatefutures wrote:But you're making the mistake that I'm arguing against, and that is Efficiency != Superiority. A Honda Civic hybrid is more efficient than an M-1 Abrams tank, does that make it superior to the tank? You need to factor in purpose when you look at architecture, otherwise how do you know what you're supposed to build? The P4 has the superior architecture for multimedia, the Athlon has the superior architecture for scientific calculations. If you fall outside of these two camps, it doesn't really matter as you don't need all that power just to check your e-mail.
alternatefutures wrote:The problem with going by most programs in the x86 instruction set is that most of those don't need the power. Honestly, I don't care if a CPU can run Word a thousand times faster than the PIII I'm writing this on as I am the bottleneck, not the CPU. That leaves benchmarks (I ignore synthetics, just real world), and honestly, since the 2.8Ghz the P4 has been gaining ground over the Athlon in terms of number of benchmarks "won"(for the record, I give no credibility to any benchmarks coming from AMD or Intel, only third parties), which, by your rating would make Northwood superior to Barton, even though it is less efficient.
alternatefutures wrote:But you're making the mistake that I'm arguing against, and that is Efficiency != Superiority. A Honda Civic hybrid is more efficient than an M-1 Abrams tank, does that make it superior to the tank?
dwchang wrote:Well say what you want about power, but I sure as hell use it as does anyone who makes AMVs or plays 3D games. If you want just a CPU that can handle mail, word and so on...go buy something else. There's no reason to even argue if it's just about practicality. Hell under your argument, if a CPU can run Word at "your speed", that means it's sufficient since it well...runs right? Maybe that's correct, but at the same time that doesn't mean one wouldn't WANT for it to be able to do more...hell there's things like multi-tasking, more complicated programs and so on. If you want a computer that can run Word or e-mail at your speed, go buy a PI 60 Mhz computer. Now I know that's not what you mean, but you are basically downplaying that people want performance. I do care if Word can run 1000x faster than PI since it means I can do other things and so on.
Significantly overclocked Pentiums and Athlons can be maintained at near freezing and still be so unstable you can't boot to Windows. Cooling is not the only limit to a chip's design
That would be the MOBILE Pentium 4, which is a lower voltage P4. The desktop version wouldn't be in a laptop unless there was a market for a laptop/heating blanket
I might also add that the backbone of the Pentium-M architecture was the PIII
At the same time, one will probably wonder why is Intel clobbering us? That answer is easy....MOST consumers equate bigger numbers with better performance. This is due to Intel's marketing department and even I will say that they do a GREAT job in convincing the consumer that Ghz = performance
not as laughable as say the Itanium (We've sold more Opterons in one deal (Cray Super Computers ~10,000) than Intel has Itaniums in 3 years haha).
A Honda Civic hybrid is more efficient than an M-1 Abrams tank, does that make it superior to the tank?
the Black Monarch wrote:No dude, I really did mean the DESKTOP version. All 15 volts. Have you ever been to the Alienware website to look at their laptops? They don't offer the mobile P4s anymore. The Area 51-m is well known for its extremely short battery life (75 mins doing nothing, 30 if you're playing music in Windows Media Player) and large weight and volume because of the hugeass cooling system.
the Black Monarch wrote:The newspaper said that the Centrino used a completely new architecture...
the Black Monarch wrote:Umm... no... Intel has done nothing of the sort. Their commercials make absolutely no mention of clock speeds, and some of them (specifically, the ones with the Blue Man Group) don't mention the chips at all. If consumers equate bigger numbers with performance, it's because of their own stupidity and not Intel.
Personally, I think Intel is winning because of its "monopolistic practices" that you mentioned. If I could have gotten an AMD in my laptop instead of a P4, I would have.
the Black Monarch wrote:The Itanium was not made for the mainstream. I can't remember what the hell it was supposed to be, though.
the Black Monarch wrote:dwchang, I think you should mention cache memory. If I remember correctly, the P4 has like twice as much L2 cache as the biggest Athlon, making the Athlon much more likely to choke when faced with particularly cache-intensive applications (the Quake III engine, for example, was specifically designed to take advantage of the P4's superior L2 cache).
the Black Monarch wrote:I noticed something very interesting on the AMD website a few months ago. They like to portray their side-by-side comparisons and benchmarks as very fair and unbiased, showing where the P4 is better (like L2 cache) and where the Athlon is better (like instructions/Hz). However, I noticed that in their benchmarks, they used high-end Nvidia or ATI video cards in their own machines and used low-end Intel video cards for the Intel machines. Hmm.
dwchang wrote:Also they were trying to force the entire industry to go 64-bit (they thought they had the power...a normal flaw a lot of companies make). We decided to go x86-64 with 32-bit support so you could choose when to go to 64-bit since it had both. Another reason why we are getting these design wins.
dwchang wrote:At the same time, even if you have a big cache, if your architecture that uses it isn't that good, it won't be used effectively. Why do you think a processor that is 800 Mhz slower and has a smaller cache (well with Barton it's even, but take a T-bred B) can even have COMPRABLE (didnt' say beat) performance to a 3.06 Ghz? Because we have a more efficient architecture. As you said instr/ghz we're more efficient. They just have some more speed and thus it evens out.
alternatefutures wrote:
Uh, the flaw Intel made was making a chip that was so freaking expensive. It's a good chip, just not nearly worth as much as it's being sold for and it sucks at 32-bit (Madison should beat the pants off Opteron, but it still costs an arm and a leg) They weren't forcing any industry into 64-bit considering there were already 64-bit CPUs out there for the high-end server market. Intel's idea was to EVENTUALLY switch everything over to IA64. Considering the masses do not currently need over 4gigs of RAM and that the current x86 offerings are really RISC processors that break x86 instruction code down I like Intel's plan better than AMD's. That's not to say AMD's is a bad thing or that Intel's execution was even remotely decent, just I would have liked to have seen this 20-some year platform get thrown to the curb.
Return to Video Hardware Discussion
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest