Athlon vs. Pentium

[Y2Ant]

So after having 3 Pentiums, and noticing that an AMD Athlon 3700 was much cheaper than a 3.7GHz Pentium, i've decided to give AMD a go. I've just realised though that the clock speed is running at 2.2GHz, and on the Pentium it says the speed is actually the 3.7GHz or whichever one I look at, so have I basically bought a 3700+ thinking I was getting a 3.7GHz and really only getting a 2.2? :o

I would overclock but I dunno how, or if it's gonna be dangerous or what. :(

[Bad Company]

The fact is, that AMD processors are so well designed that a 2.2ghz like yours is the equivilant to a 3.7ghz Pentium.
Quite a while back AMD realised that they were losing the ghz race with Intel, as the Pentium four design can scale higher in its clock speeds than the Athlon, but was slower at the equivilant speed.
They decided to rebrand their products, as people judge the speed of a PC by how many ghz it is, rather than looking at the processor design, or other factors of the PC Design (chipset, ram timing etc)
If AMD didn't do this, then they pretty much would of gone out of business.
So don't worry, you don't have an inferior product.

If your going to overclock, you need to have a decent heatsink, decent quality ram, and a decent power supply. Ask if you want any recommendations.

[JiM PolPot v.W.o.]

A good ol' throughput versus latency post...

Definitions:
Latency is how long is takes for something to happen.
Throughput is the amount of things happening per unit time.
Pipelines are the stages of logic that a processor uses to execute an instruction.

Intel has lower latency due to the increased clock speeds. However, AMD can achieve the same throughput as the Intel chips at a much lower clock speed. The reason for this is because the Intel chips have very long pipelines (between 20-32 stages). The longer pipelines allow instructions to be broken up into smaller chunks, which result in less propagation delay between registers, and therefore allow for a higher clock speed. However, the design of the Netburst architecture (which is used in the pentium 4) requires many stall states for dependencies between consecutive instructions. This is the tradeoff of making a pipeline longer. This means that although the clock is running at an extremely high rate, the processor is just sitting there doing nothing for many of those clock cycles. Overall, the AMD has a shorter pipeline and is better at avoiding stalls. They invested the chip's real estate in extra logic to avoid the stalls rather than extra logic for additional pipeline stages. The investment has paid off.

As far as the lower latency on the Intel chips, you do not care about this because individual instructions do not matter as far as the completion of your program is concerned. The only thing that matters here is throughput.

My recommendation is to go with the AMD chips because they are cheaper and get the same performance.

[Y2Ant]

as complex as that post sounded I actually understood it :o

I prefer how an AMD chip sounds, running a slower clock speed but with the shorter pipeline, bottom line being that a Pentium doing the same job at the same speed overall would have cost me an extra £100 or more, so I made the right choice.

Thanks guys <3<3<3

[Y2Ant]

As for overclocking i'm running a COLORSit golden 500W PSU, 2.5 GB of RAM running dual channel (2 x 256's which i'm not sure which make they are and 2 x 1 GB's of Corsair Value sticks) and the heatsink which came with the AMD, which was a bitch to install btw :(

I don't think i'll need to overclock really, with a new processor, ram, 2 new SATA Seagate 250GB Barracuda hard drives (which I picked up rather cheap) and shit, the PC runs smooth as hell at the moment :cool:

[JiM PolPot v.W.o.]

Keep in mind that overclocking can only do so much to boost performance due to the Von Neumann Bottleneck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Von_Neumann_bottleneck

Overclocking is also kind of risky because a processor is given its speed rating for a reason. You have to keep in mind that even with a good heatsink and cooling system, it is still really easy to fuck up the CPU due to the extremely hot surface temps that can occur. If you do it, do only small increments of frequency increases at a time.

I doubt you are doing any intensive parallel computation other than gaming so I recommend that the best place to invest is in RAM and a top of the line GPU.

[LoDownM]

My AMD64 > All the Intel's my friends have. Nuff said :)

[Bad Company]

My Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8ghz) is at 2.5ghz easy :)