Pentium III 600 MHZ or AMD Athlon?

nix

AMD is starting to breathe down Intel's neck. Their new CPU, a 650MHZ workhorse named the Athlon, was introduced to rave reviews. Or should I say previews. The CPU, which outperforms Intel's newest pentium, will be out in a few weeks. And based on a poll conducted by Gamespot, over fifty percent of the correspondents said that they would consider buying the AMD chip over the Pentium. Would you?

basho

Intel is tried and true. I go for PIII.

batang uliran

The tests have shown so far that the AMD Athlon 600MHZ is marginally faster (about 5%) than the Intel Pentium III 600MHZ. The 650MHZ Athlon is about 15% faster than the 600MHZ Intel PIII. The difference is that the Athlon chip uses a 200MHZ bus vs. the 100MHZ bus used by the PIII chips.

jack

competition is GOOD. as long as their are no bugs, i wouldn't hesitate to buy the best hardware my money can buy. im not that BRAND conscious.

dave

in terms of architecture, the athlon is far more superior; from the number of floating point and integer pipelines to the size of the cache(32k L1 for p3 and 128k L1 for athlon), i think the athlon will enjoy its lead in the benchmarks for sometime.
and also, i think the current releases of the athlons still use the 100MHz or 133MHz SDRAMs and not the '200MHz' versions of it. so if we eliminate the bottleneck caused by the main memory in those benchmarks, the athlon will lead more.

marco

I go for AMD Athlon. PIII is just a slight improvement over the PII. As mentioned by batang uliran AMD has a faster bus then PIII. Bus speed is very important in processing so I go AMD.

d-u

Its about time that AMD ovetakes Intel and they should take advantage of this before the holidays.

LloD

Hmmmm. OK lang kahit ano...mas mura ang AMD kaya AMD ako.

Stone Cold

I'd just like all of you to know that Intel's just gonna put one up on AMD again. To all those who know, the Athlon is a Slot 1 type processor. Well, by the end of this year, Intel will be converting their Pentium III processors into Socket 370. So, who do you think motherboard manufacturers will support? Yep, you guessed it. So, I cast my vote with Intel. And that's the bottom line, coz Stone Cold says so!

iostream

i'm leaning more towards AMD... i happen to root for underdogs and hate monoplies... (i dont hate intel as much as i do microsoft though ... ehehehe...)

fox_m

Let us first see where this competition goes.
The underdog versus the monster. With the technology AMD is betting on (200 MHZ bus!!) or its now famous 3D NOW! MMX instructions, I think they will get the upperhand. For me, I'd first get a hold of two machines with the same specs and go WILD!! There aren't yet any assurances of the AMD technology (no 200 MHZ memory yet). Let's first test then evaluate.

Dacs

Originally posted by d-u
Its about time that AMD ovetakes Intel and they should take advantage of this before the holidays.

It has been close to 3 years now and see where AMD stands. They are no more in the shadows of Intel and they've made PC prices to go down and CPU speeds to go up!
Good work AMD and keep it up!

edmoncu

Wow! Is this one of the first threads at PEx' Technology Today forum?

KuyaDanny

For whatever it's worth, I bought a 600MHz Athlon system in February 2000 and it is still my primary system today. I don't see any reason to give it up. I might buy a larger hard drive one of these days, but everything else is fine.

Stampede

Originally posted by Dacs


It has been close to 3 years now and see where AMD stands. They are no more in the shadows of Intel and they've made PC prices to go down and CPU speeds to go up!
Good work AMD and keep it up!

are you sure about this?

from a ghz standpoint, amd is eating Intel's dust -- not to say that ghz is the one feature driving pc performance. also, from a market segment share standpoint, intel is the DOMINANT leader (triple explamation point).

actually intel should fear nvidia more than amd. on the other hand, nvidia's been actively partnering with amd (nvda ceo ata is from amd) on a lot of initiatives. nvda's battlecry: intel sucks!

BabadSaComputer

Originally posted by Stampede
from a ghz standpoint, amd is eating Intel's dust -- not to say that ghz is the one feature driving pc performance. also, from a market segment share standpoint, intel is the DOMINANT leader (triple explamation point).

it's true that intel beats the hell out of amd in the GHz standpoint, but users should not entirely use that as a basis. performance-wise, as many believe (even you), amd has the advantage. many benchmarks and reviews proved that. (athlonxp 1800+ beats intel P4 2GHz, to come to think the clock speed of the former is 1.6GHz+ only). the drawback of amd as of now would be their slow paced development of higher processor speeds. the athlonxp 2200+ (i think it's their latest) is just 1.9GHz in reality, whereas the P4 already hit 2.2 or 2.3GHz flat.

so for the meantime, intel may dominate over amd about clock rates, but performance-wise, amd still has the edge.


peace.

Dacs

Originally posted by Stampede


are you sure about this?

from a ghz standpoint, amd is eating Intel's dust -- not to say that ghz is the one feature driving pc performance. also, from a market segment share standpoint, intel is the DOMINANT leader (triple explamation point).

actually intel should fear nvidia more than amd. on the other hand, nvidia's been actively partnering with amd (nvda ceo ata is from amd) on a lot of initiatives. nvda's battlecry: intel sucks!

Yes I'm quite sure with my statement.
Intel is pushing their GHz clock is because to catch up with the performance of AMD and it's higher IPC. So never wonder why AMD leads Intel in benchmarks even with Intel having an edge in clockspeed.
It's true that Intel still have the larger piece of the marketshare (I never said AMD has it anyway, just making this clear) but let's face the fact that the reason why Intel has dropped their prices is to catch up with AMD. AMD is no more a company that builds shabby K6-2/3 CPU's nowadays. And we should be glad of that. Without them, Intel is still selling us overpriced CPU's

CodeBoy

Clock for clock the Pentium 3 is actually FASTER than the Pentium 4!! If I remember correctly, a P3 1Ghz Tualatin is almost as fast a P4 1.4Ghz. I think the P4 actually has inferior floating point performance to the P3 (clock per clock)...

If your app makes use of SSE2-friendly algorithms, the P4 will have an edge.

edmoncu

Originally posted by CodeBoy
Clock for clock the Pentium 3 is actually FASTER than the Pentium 4!! If I remember correctly, a P3 1Ghz Tualatin is almost as fast a P4 1.4Ghz. I think the P4 actually has inferior floating point performance to the P3 (clock per clock)...

If your app makes use of SSE2-friendly algorithms, the P4 will have an edge.

Well, is the Willamette are you talking about or the Northwood?

CodeBoy

Originally posted by edmoncu


Well, is the Willamette are you talking about or the Northwood?

Williamette. Is there a 1.4Ghz Northwood? Afaik, Northwood improves on stuff like caches and bus speeds, but the P4 core archictecture is still the same - i.e. same number of ALUs, etc.

edmoncu

Originally posted by CodeBoy
Williamette. Is there a 1.4Ghz Northwood? Afaik, Northwood improves on stuff like caches and bus speeds, but the P4 core archictecture is still the same - i.e. same number of ALUs, etc.

Yeah I know.

Yups, but I was wondering, why is it that the Northwood had a performance gain against the AthlonXP?