[Powercolour]

I remember a couple of years back when i had the hardest time understanding AMD's "performance"

So to simplfy things:
To understand Performance ratings you have to realize that frequency does not mean speed, it is only proportional to speed. Think of it in terms of work.

There are 2 workers, woker A (intel) and worker B (AMD)
Worker A can do 1 joule of work per operation and he does it at 3 billion operations per second.
3000000000x1 = 3000000000j per second
Worker B can do 1.5 joules of work per operation but he does it at 2 billion operations per second.
2000000000x1.5 = 3000000000j per second

Now convert the joules to mhz and you have your performance rating.
In this way an 3.0ghz intel performs on par with an 2.0 ghz AMD.

[Judas]

you are correct that there is more to the equation for preformance then just mhz.... or else we would never see macs getting any light (extremely low MHZ but preform amazing with video and graphical content..)

Mhz vs MFlops and i do beleive there are additional rated speeds to sum it all up

[Geminiwave]

yeah I always thought that meant our AMD-K6-2 333mhz was the same as a 500mhz P3. yeah....it doesnt mean that at all. LOL! damn were we stuck with that POS for the longest time. I had that until may 2004. Then I got this comp and I can play games!! YESSSSSSSSSSS!

[The_Neon_Cowboy]

it's a mess it's more of a "compairitve" then a rateing system too

for exmple a barton 2500+ 1.83 ghz 640k= 2.5 ghz p4
semptron 2400+ 1.66 ghz 384k= 2.4 ghz p4 celleron

there more but it's confuseing

[Judas]

i was under the impression that AMD brought out the "rating" system just to get away from the mhz deal... but still have it rated in comparison to the intel cpus UNTILL both IBM and AMD figure out a mathmatically corrected overall cpu rating system....

[CDsDontBurn]

i like AMDs rating system. Then that way when i'm at work, i tell customers that AMDs clock speeds are significantly lower than a p4, the way it works it's to be rated at that level p4.

ex. AMD 3000+ = p4 3.0Ghz. It usually works and i get to sell people either an AMD kit, or an AMD system unless the person(s) are totally biased towards intel.

[Geminiwave]

Originally Posted by CDsDontBurn

i like AMDs rating system. Then that way when i'm at work, i tell customers that AMDs clock speeds are significantly lower than a p4, the way it works it's to be rated at that level p4.

ex. AMD 3000+ = p4 3.0Ghz. It usually works and i get to sell people either an AMD kit, or an AMD system unless the person(s) are totally biased towards intel.

yeah but as far as the AXP procs...the XP 3000+ is still pretty much slower than the P4 3ghz. I mean they are close, but the P4 does alot of workstation stuff better...I think the AXP might do games better but I am not sure(maybe thats just the 64bit procs that do games better)

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by Geminiwave

yeah but as far as the AXP procs...the XP 3000+ is still pretty much slower than the P4 3ghz. I mean they are close, but the P4 does alot of workstation stuff better...I think the AXP might do games better but I am not sure(maybe thats just the 64bit procs that do games better)

lol, true. but we don't sell anymore Athlon XPs anymore. the only Socket A chips we sell now are just the semprons. Athlon 64s rule !

[Judas]

a 3000+ 939 cpu matches up very well witha P4 3ghz..

to top it off, over clock the 3000+ to 4000+ or higher and it blows it out of the water

[dipstick]

Isn't the AMD rating system based on the T'bird core and not the P4? Either way I'd say they are much more accurate with the ratings against the P4s with the new A64's.

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by Judas

a 3000+ 939 cpu matches up very well witha P4 3ghz..

to top it off, over clock the 3000+ to 4000+ or higher and it blows it out of the water

No doubt about that. I should have been patient and gotten me an A64 instead of my p4 set up. Oh well, live and learn .

[pr0digal jenius]

i personally don't care for the ratings system...it's marketing at it's finest, yes...but I feel it dupes a lot of 'less then savvy' customers into buying AMD when intel may have actually served them better.

[CDsDontBurn]

at work we paired up a p4 775 (3Ghz) vs. an A64 3000+ to see which one ran best. On both we ran 4 applications of Toast, and played a DVD movie all at the same time. The A64 performed better than the p4. the p4 machine started studdering when playing the movie, and the mouse wouldn't respond. after a few minutes, the p4 system had locked up. the A64 system although very sluggish, did not lock up. The point of that test we did at work was to see if HyperThreading really did do much of anything at all.

Both systems had 512Mb of memory (DDR 400 on both), WD 80Gb SATA, and 16x Dual Layer LiteOn DVD-RW optical drives. The only difference were the processors and MoBos of course.

[Zardon]

I own both systems and im afraid this simplied rating isnt always accurate..... if you frequently use 5 or 6 applications and multitask a lot, then that AMD 2 gig v Intels 3 gig starts to show differences, HT is excellent for multitasking, which is why my AMD 64 3800+ still sits as a secondary system compared to my Extreme edition.

[pr0digal jenius]

what mobos.....and the 775 is all prescott cores, I'd be interested to see a northwood 3GHz tested

on 4 copies of toast, heat alone could have locked the prescott

[Judas]

AMD needs a boost in the FSB no matter what, if amd can push a solid 266 or even better fsb... there memory limitations would be much less.... We still are seeing even with dual channel memory controllers built into the cpu, memory limitations....

[CDsDontBurn]

Originally Posted by pr0digal jenius

what mobos.....and the 775 is all prescott cores, I'd be interested to see a northwood 3GHz tested

on 4 copies of toast, heat alone could have locked the prescott

This is the intel board, and this is the AMD board used in the two systems. Both are kinda lame i think, but the average consumer will not really care about what kind of motherboard they have in their system so long as their system works

[Vampyromaniac]

The rating system is crap. It was based on the Thunderbird (don't know if it still is), but nobody cares how a current CPU compares to a Thunderbird, it's of more interest how the 2 brands compare.
And if you compare the rating to Intel speed any way, you're almost never accurate. It of course varies depending on what area of computing you're comparing.
But then, consumers need some kind of indicator to look at, and I guess nobody can come up with a better idea.

[BWX]

Who cares really though- an Athlon @ 2.2ghz with a 400mhz FSB or higher with low latency ram with a 1/1 ratio is plenty fast for gaming and whatever else you throw at it. If they called it an "Athlon 2.2ghz" all the uneducated people in the world would just look at the pentium 3ghz and buy that because they see bigger numbers. AMD had to do something to show the difference, most people don't look past the "name" so I guess this is what they decided they had to do.. Obviously The AMD chips do more work per cycle, especially with games.

Of course AMD used to undercut the price and allow more flexibility with unlocked multipliers, now that isn't the case so much anymore with the new chips, which is a shame.

[CDsDontBurn]

i can't wait for the day that AMD breaks the 3Ghz barrier. Those things are going to open up a can of whoop-ass !

[Vampyromaniac]

One can only hope. With Intel stopping raising clocks (just for now hopefully), I hope AMD keeps going for a while. This dual-core/hyperthreading stuff doesn't excite me too much.

[CDsDontBurn]

The dual core is making me very excited from AMDs platform. It'll be like having two processors on one chip .

[Vampyromaniac]

I'd rather have one processor at twice the speed

[CDsDontBurn]

then it'll be the same difference then.