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Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You? 174

Posted by Hemos from the building-the-ultimate-game-machine dept.
CitizenC wrote to us with a cool review/overview of the Pentium III and the Athlon. If you've trying to decide what to get, give this a read-through.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You? More

Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You?

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  • Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21, 2000 @06:53AM (#1118881)
    Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade... What's the big rush? My 8088 is doing just fine for me thank you so very much. My Jumpman scores have even been improving lately!

  • The Athlon was right for me. (Score:5)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @06:53AM (#1118882) Homepage Journal
    Athlon 700: $189.
    Pentium III 700: $373.

    That's about all I have to say.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • I totally agree. Although I haven't played jumpman in a while. Now that I think about it I do have a C=64 emulator somewhere. Maybe I'll fire it back up :) But then again I guess some of these new games do require quite a bit of horsepower. Jess

  • Cost Peformance.... and personal Preference! (Score:3)

    by ndfa ( 71139 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @06:55AM (#1118884)
    AMD is the one I would go for... you can get the 133Mhz Mobo's with AGP 4x and a 600 Mhz K7 for 360! Now thats good price, and the memory is not going to cost you that much either!!

    WHEN are they going to come out with the dual processor MOBO"s for the Athlon... thats going to be freaking awesome. I mean thats where hte EV6 should shine.

  • What do you people do on these machines to need that much power? the only things i can think of are servers (which i can understand) or Quake 3 or something. But I don't run servers on my desktop machine and don't play Quake.

    I just find it crazy to have 1Ghz chips.
    I can see people that could really use it,
    but for the general public???

    I still think PII 400's are fast as hell.
    Is this what getting old is all about?
  • Hey kevin congrats!

    I'm down with Intel and all, but AMD is going to rape them. When i have the cash, i say a product switch is going to be called upon!
    JediLuke
  • The real question is, will I be able to wait long enough to get a "Spitfire"...

    It's good to see a review mention "Price" early on. That's a big concern to me. My computer never costs more than $1,100, and I always try to get something better (at least twice as good every two years).

    Oh yeah, and I'm buying a new system. But I'm pretty sure my current K6/300 setup wouldn't be able to handle an Athlon. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].

  • Athlon "is better?" perspective (Score:5)

    by windex ( 92715 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @06:59AM (#1118888) Homepage
    I'm using an athlon 700mhz, have been for a few months now, w/ a asus K7M motherboard. I've had absoutley zero problems with this machine under linux, and while not trying to sound like a zelot, nothing but problems under windows. With the pentinum III, I had constant problems under Linux with certian optimizations, yet windows ran perfectly. My geuss is this: It just depends on what your doing. I've got plenty of CPU to go around in the Linux world.. 1405.75 bogomips, woot. However, in Win2k, I noticed qutie offten that the processor useage meter is maxxed when I go to do a bunch of trivial things, like check e-mail, sit on irc, and play mp3's at the same time, however on my 450 pIII laptop, these tasks dont come CLOSE to using all the CPU, and considering in Linux, running X11/XMMS/Pine/Netscape, etc, all at once, my Athlon system reports as having aproximatley 97% CPU free at all times. Sooo... ultimatley, the decision is yours. Mine is this: pIII for Windows, Athlon for Linux.
    --- 'dex
  • I am probably part of the general public, and I always want photoshop to run that much faster, or be able to have more browser windows open, or whatever. The second I use something faster, my machine (PII 333 with 64MB ram) is that much slower.

    You probably don't like to drive fast either...
  • Try connecting with a VPN using some serious encryption. The CPU overhead for the encryption algorithms will slow eveything to a crawl. This is where the high MHz is very nice for a personal laptop (not that we can get a 1GHz laptop yet, but soon)
  • Hey, you ever play Janitor Joe? Now, that was a fun game... Freeware too.


    OoO
  • Dual Athlon MB is expected in Q4 this year.
  • the Coppermine Xeon PIII's are exceptional aswell, and at a price point thats more realistic than the aged bretheren.

    When I do upgrade my Mobo-Cpu's I am going with the Xeon PIII (750+). Right now I am running a dual system and couldn't go back to a single cpu (compiling is slow enough as it is).

    When is AMD going to produce that promised Dual Setup anyway??

  • And all that hard drive noise when you open those browser windows is swap. Get more ram.
  • Seems to me the more likely culprit is Windows: in all likelyhood, it's misreporting the CPU usage. Ne pas?

    --
  • WHERE is the documentation on all these alleged Athlon incompatibilities? I keep hearing people say "the Athlon has some compatibility problems" but I have yet to see anyone back them it with specifics. If you're going to make this statement, let's see some facts.

    How long will your P3 last? How long before Intel decides to change the packaging AGAIN? Got any failure rate comparisons between the two?
  • Encryption cards can do that stuff 6 times faster than a cpu. =) With a laptop though..im not sure if there are any pcmcia encryption cards. But anyways if you are doing something like a gateway-gateway VPN or something, its doesn't fit under what i call regular joe desktop usage. All my neighbors do is get on aol and download mp3's and they have phenomenal hardware. Its just silly.
  • I was just spec'ing a new R&D machine this afternoon for heavy compiling. THis is exactly the article I wanted to see.

    I'm addicted to dual-processors though, I really wish the Dual-Athlons were out.
  • The real question is, will I be able to wait long enough to get a "Spitfire"...

    The Spitfire is going to be their next "value" processor - of course no one knows much about AMD's next line, but the Athlon might be a better buy now...

    I'm waiting for "Thunderbird" - their next processor series in the Athlon line...

  • Athlon is faster than PIII at same clock speed.
    Athlon is cheaper than PIII at same clock speed.

    Is this really a contest?
  • Bah, you can't run linux on that! GO HOME DOS lUSER! heh...

    --
    linuxisgood:~$ man woman

  • Dual Athlon Motherboard (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @07:09AM (#1118902) Homepage Journal
    Will the Dual Athlon motherboards require a special SMP Athlon chip or will they work with any Athlon on the market? I'd heard a rumor that the current Athlons have a pin disabled to keep them from doing SMP. Of course, my sources aren't particularly reliable...
  • In Slashdot today we took a little trip
    Along with CDR TACO in the moderated ship,
    We took a little flamebait and we took a little troll
    And we watched the bloody battle of Athlon and Pentium 3.

    P3 fired their guns and the Athlon kept a-coming
    There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
    P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
    On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

    Ole Intel said we could take 'em by surprise
    If we didn't fire our flames 'till we look 'em in the eyes.
    We held our flops 'til we seen their floatpoint well
    Then we opened up our new chips and really gave 'em, Well..

    P3 fired their guns and the Athlon kept a-coming
    There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
    P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
    On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

    They ran through the shareware and they ran through the compiles
    And they ran through the internet where the haxors couldn't go.
    They ran so fast that the RISC couldn't catch 'em
    On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

    P3 fired their flames and the Athlon kept a-coming
    There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
    P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
    On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

    P3 fired their flames 'til the chips melted down
    Then we grabbed an XT and we fought another round.
    They stuffed the troll with steamy grits and powdered his behind,
    And when they shot the fire off the troller lost his mind.

    P3 fired their flames and the Athlon kept a-coming
    There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
    P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
    On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

  • Just visit jeffk's site and see what he has to say about amd vs intel.
    www.somethingawful.com/jeffk [somethingawful.com]
  • You, my friend, need more RAM!
  • Processor speed has little to do with your boot time. Look rather at your BIOS (does it do a goofy memory check? have you enabled LBA, 32-bit disk access, multi-block.) Look at what device drivers are being loaded. Do they have timeout probes on various cards? Look at the harddrive health. Is it heavily fragmented? Is it a 10,000 RPM drive? Does it use some kind of translation that leads to pathological seeking? Does it have bad sectors that are automatically remapped causing more cross-drive seeking? How much ram does each system have?

    I mean let's get real here. My original Franklin ACE 1000 (Apple II+ clone) booted to Applesoft basic in less than 1 second. It would boot to DOS 3.3 (yeah the original DOS 3.3) in around 8 seconds. And it only had a 1.1-ish Mhz processor. Gosh your athlon must be really slow. :)
  • When is AMD going to produce that promised Dual Setup anyway??

    Everything I heard varies from this summer to this winter, but it sounds like it's at least going to be -sometime- in 2K. My question is - will they debut their multiprocessor solution using Athlons or their new "Thunderbirds"?

    Anyone heard anything?

  • Compiler optimizations (Score:3)

    by EngrBohn ( 5364 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @07:15AM (#1118908)
    The egcs man page mentions architecture-specific optimization is available up to the i486 (and, by extention, the am486). The man page being somewhat dated, I checked the egcs info page and found architecture-specific optimization listed for the i586 ("pentium") and for the i686 ("pentiumpro"). But I saw nothing for the K5, K6*, or K7/Athlon. Am I blind, is the documentation lacking, or does the compiler not include architecture-specific optimizations for post-486 AMD processors?
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • My earlier post..I noticed my link was broken...
    oops.

    Anyhow, jeffk at somethingawful.com has a full
    review on amd vs. intel as well. Although not
    as informative as most reviews...he definately
    approaches the situation from a different angle.
    That angle being one in a completely different dimension.

    Judge for yourself [somethingawful.com]...should jeffk be instituted?
  • Processor companies keep cranking out faster and faster processors but its getting to the point where it'll start bottlenecking.
    Yes RAM and storage devices are getting faster, but not at the same rate as processors.

    Anyways, I'd buy an Athalon just because its that much cheaper for what you get.
  • Your Athlon is not fully compatible, and my Pentium III will last longer. You are only looking at the short term.

    Fully compatible to what? Why don't we talk about Intel changing standards and then you can tell me all about any incompatabilities. What about all of the bugs in the P3 chips? Have there been any of these bugs in the Athlon?

    Do you honestly think Intel uses a better fabrication process to ensure longer life in their chips? Intel makes chips as cheaply as possible. AMD puts as much quality as possible into their Athlons in order to gain market share.

    Get a clue.

  • This is seriously off topic.

    It's one thing for you to enjoy a higher performing computer who's only risk is that you might be expected to accomplish more in your 8 hour day. It's something entirely different to drive excessively fast. You are putting yourself and others in serious danger when you speed. There are no magic technological advances that make you a better driver, that improve the reliability of a vehicle as it flies uncontrollably into oncoming traffic. If you really want to be pissed off about something, think about the complete contempt a speeding driver has for your and your families lives.

  • Coming from a family of techies, we have gone through at least a dozen processors in six years. Over those years AMD has been our processor of choice (although we own Intel stock!). AMD has consistantly outpriced Intel, but until recently has always lagged behind Intel in their clock speeds. However, the new Althon chips and AMD's new marketing strategy may undermine Intel's dominance of the market.

    True Story: At a computer show, the guy next to me instisted on buying a 400Mhz computer with an Intel ship, even though the price of the AMD computer was $100 cheaper. Why? Intel has managed to market themselves as the processor company. That little jingle Intel has advertisers play is highly recognizable. The fact of the matter is that the people who unwillingly use Microsoft products probably buy computers with Intel processors, simply because of Intel's marketing strategy. (no offense to people who use Microsoft products)

    Recently, television commericals for DELL now feature AMD processors. AMD is catching on, now that their processor chips are faster and cheaper than Intels, they should probably start a much more aggresive advertising campaign.

    I hope that AMD really become a competitor for Intel; because in the end, competition benifits us, the comsumer. We will wind up paying less for better chips, since the two companies must compete for our business.

    BTW, I actaully own a PII-400 now, ending the "family" tradition of buying AMD processors, since I though Intel was going to jump ahead in processor speed. Boy was I wrong!

  • Why would you want to turn off you computer?

  • CPU less important today (Score:4)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @07:23AM (#1118916)
    With CPU speeds getting to be what they are, I think two components are being forgotten, and how much they can impact performance.. harddrives and memory.

    PC100 or PC133? While it's really nice to have more bandwidth available, most people will never even tax a PC100 bus - it's 800MB/s! The determining factor for me is latency. The lower the latency, the less time the processor has to spend waiting. Latency is the reason why we have explicit parallelism and a half-dozen other methods to speed up the processor - predictive branching, etc. Lowering the latency has a direct benefit on system performance.

    The next one is the HDD. How long must I wait to load a program? Having lots of memory helps, but the data has to come from somewhere - that somewhere is either the network or your harddrive. Fast harddrives mean less time spent waiting for files to load. Most people don't know that loading, say, IE5, under windows can load upwards of 50 files! If your track-to-track is 0.8 instead of 0.6.. you're gonna spend a few extra /seconds/ loading those files.

    In short, the processor means nothing if you don't have the I/O up to snuff to keep it from idling.

  • Personally, I'd rather have a PIII but Intel has been sufferring with the whole RDRAM 820i chipset fiasco. Of course you can use the Via 133A chipset, which is a decent replacement but suffers from some memory bandwidth and AGP issues for some boards. Athlons are very fast especially if you like playing 3D games but you need a special device to overclock them. As a self proclaimed hard core gamer / overclocker I'd wait until the new Celerons come out. People whine about the 66MHz bus speed but I think it's a blessing. Multiplier of 9 x 66MHz bus = 600MHz. Multipler of 9 x 100MHz bus = 900MHz! All I gotta say is w00t! Plus Celeron IIs can run on the BX chipset so there's no need to get a new board for that Coppermine EB or Athlon. Another thing is I think Via announced that they are working on a chipset that supports DDR RAM which runs at 266MHz? (not quite sure). Until RDRAM becomes anything near reasonable (oh the price dropped! it's only 500 bucks! yay!) I'd stick with DDR RAM for any future system. But think about it this way. Who cares? 6 months later you're going to upgrade anyway. :P -chongus
  • A link, something, anything. What chipset? Any particular AGP version (1x, 2x, 4x)? Specific to certain video chipsets?

    If the problems are known, and you know what htey are, you obviously gleaned that information from somewhere. Unless you're parroting what someone else told you they heard from their sister's boyfriend's cousin's father's 2nd wife's boss'grandson.
  • I guess you didn't read my sarcasm reply to myself.... :P
  • Your PIII will last longer because you will not be able to afford to replace or augment it. With my leftover money, I'll buy more memory, or just replace it with the next generation when it's available. Too bad... for you.
  • Finally, something resembling evidence. I'd love to get a GeForce, but I prefer Linux, and my new box won't dual-boot (ah, the magic of VMWare). No GeForce on Linux for me, so I'm going Voodoo.
  • You are correct about Photoshop being RAM and disk dependant -- although that depends on the size of the images you work with.

    One thing to note is that Adobe is on the Intel PIII payroll (Photoshop being featured in their television ads), so don't expect any AMD support anytime soon.

    Does a G4 still beat a 2-way PIII setup?
  • SPPEED KINGS: AMD VERSIS PENTIUM [somethingawful.com]

    Gives you all the information you really want and none of that technical mumbo-jumbo.

  • They plan to keep the Cyrix brand alive.

    Via is a kick-ass company. Everything they make works great and is dirt cheap.

    Let's hope our president doesn't sell out Taiwan. The last thing we need is China bombing out their factories. Without Via, we'd probably be paying twice as much for motherboards.
  • Check out pgcc [goof.com]. It has K6 optimizations, and will utilize 3DNow assembly.

    I use it on my 700MHz k7m system, and it works well.

  • I have a K7M and a athlon 700 as well. My GeForce 256 requires alot more wattage than the PCI bus wants to give it so I had to up the voltage on that, but other than that it is rock stable under both operating systems.

    Don't blame the processor/mobo.. it's probably some faulty device driver causing your problems.

  • wasnt it called Jump Jump Joe? or is that some other game.
  • Not fully compatible with what? With an overly expensive RAM architecture? guilty as charged.

    looking at the short term eh? We all see how the technology business has been growing by leaps and bounds; what else is there to look at? we both know in 10 years we will laugh at the processor speeds of todays fastest commercial solutions; do i need a computer to last as long as a car? sure it would be nice, but if you were buying a Model T and you knew in 5 years they would have cars that could go 300% faster and they would raise the speed limit on all roads by 30mph...would you care about long lasting?

    if your looking for a computer, you can get an Athlon 700 or so, total machine, for under $900 easy, and still have it pretty nicely configured. go for Intel's solution, we are talking $1300+ ...for me, thats not a tough choice. the king is dead, long live the king.
  • When the original K6 came out it had some compatibility issues. When the K6-2 & K6-3 came out there were very few, namely the problem with Windows 95 and chips over 350mhz, but AMD had a patch within days of the products release.

    Although I represent a datapoint of 1, I have run into NO compatibility problems with my Athlon 500 in Windows 98,2000,NT, or Linux. And apparently nobody else has either based on the complete lack of reports to the contrary. If only we could say the same for Coppermine or the Camino chipsets from Intel.
  • Ok, so the preview is not functional one bit for me. It *should* have read that the above link will take you to a page which details exactly what you are looking for.

    Damn slashdot.
  • the thing that makes the decision for me is Symmetric Multi Processing support, dual boxen are mutch more impressive :P
  • Now I just can't wait for spitfire. Then we get to see celeron2 vs spitfire.

    While I wait,what do you guys think of this? [wsu.edu]
  • > Athlon is faster than PIII at same clock speed.
    > Athlon is cheaper than PIII at same clock speed.

    But the PIII does get the same clock speed at the same clock speed!

    --
  • if your a car driver and your job is to drive a certain amount of miles or a distance by the end of the week (a deadline) then being able to have a fast cpu is nice (along with a fast system in all regards). there is the down side in production of products though...speed. if you make something that runs fast on your system, then dust off the 'old' p166 and run it, you might want to cry. its for this reason that developers hope for faster systems as well...the ability to do more. it may seem an excuse for slipshod inefficient code, and sometimes is...but there is also a certain ability gained with faster computers in general.
  • Fire up the NT Performance Monitor and check the %Privileged Time versus the %CPU time as a whole. It could be a slow driver or an IO problem.
  • > Athlon 700: $189.

    Dual Cel 366 o/c to 550: $35 each = $70
    Abit BP6 = $120

    I'll stick with my dual system, thx.

  • We all know that the bestest AMD vs Intel review is JeffK's [somethingawful.com].
  • As far as I know, the AMD equivalents to Intel processors have compatible instruction sets. So a program on a K6-2 can be compiled with i586 optimizations. While I'm less sure about this, I also believe that something could be compiled on an Athlon with i686 optimization and work. Granted, it won't have 3DNow optimizations, but an i686 optimization doesn't have SSE either.

    Chris Hagar
  • > What do you people do on these machines to need that much power?

    1. Compiling.

    On my p3-500 here at work it takes 30 mins to compile our game.

    2. Graphics.

    Even with GPUs (sorry nVidia, you didn't invent that term, Sony was using it WAY before you with the PSX docs) we still need faster cpu's. How many games today are pushing scenes of 5+ million polys?. Right. None.

    With a 100 GHz machine (yes not MHz) we might start seeing some real-time ray-tracing.

    As a graphics programmer, I can't wait for the future ! :-)

    "If I protest an illegal tax, does that make me an illegal tax protestor?!"

  • Re:Boot time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This may not matter to most of the readers, but there is an inherent advantage to shutting down the system, which cannot be achieved by software.

    You don't use electricity. Now, most of you don't care if your power bill is $10 higher each month, but for poor college students who share flats and electric bills, well it can be an issue.

    No, Rain and waterfall don't count. the machine still pulls a respectable amount of juice (so do monitors in low power mode).

    Also, powering down makes your machine invulnerable to van eck phreaking >:) and almost totally invincible to hacking (i say almost, because someone would inevitably say, "what if the hacker has nanorobots huh? didn't think of that didja?" well, i did think of it. :P )

  • are you joking? spitfire will beat CuPIII much less celeron2.
  • Blue Screen Of Death? It ain't your processor, buddy, it's your operating system.
  • 98% of boot time is determined by hard drive speed + system configuration. Booting your pc has very little to do with cpu cycles!!!
  • Given those two choices........I'll take death.

  • Re:Dual Athlon Motherboard (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm pretty sure that all Athlons are already SMP capable, though I think larger cache versions of the Athlon (beyond Mustang) that are more suitable for server applications are coming out around when the dual chipset comes out. From what I hear about the multi-chip architecture, each chip can talk to two Athlons, but multiple chips can be connected for 4 and 8 processor boards. Still, I'd expect these multi-chip chipsets to be pretty pricey considering that it uses a point-to-point protocol rather than a bus, like the PII-PIII (e.i. the chipset will need a LOT of pins to talk to two Athlons).
  • "My GeForce 256 requires alot more wattage than the PCI bus wants to give it so I had to up the voltage on that, but other than that it is rock stable under both operating systems."

    How exactly would I go about determining something like that? Would a card just fail if there was not enough wattage? And forgive me if I'm EE clueless, but if it wanted more wattage, how did turning up the voltage help?
  • Within a month and a half, AMD will be shipping it's newest versions of the Athlon which include full speed on die cache. There will be spitfire which is the value version and thunderbird which is the performance version. From rumors that have been online recently the spitfire is being delayed until the thunderbird is ready. The reason is that spitfire is faster than current athlons, but it's the value version. Both are supposed to be released in June, but rumors are that it will be sooner. Much like when athlon beat katmai hands down, that will once again be the case once these are released. I'd recommend waiting two months and then buying a thunderbird. Paul Sundling

  • Dell has been the last holdout on using AMD chips; probably due to their cosy relationship with Intel. I havn't heard anything about them switching yet. Maybe you mean another mfg such as Compaq, Gateway, IBM etc. All of which are now using Athlon chips, and promoting that fact too!

    All of the OEM's have been burnt by Intel recently by product shortages, bugs and low performence relative to the Athlon. Dell is the last holdout on using AMD processors.

  • Where can I get a web browser for my old XT?

  • Your post was great. I love satire. It did NOT deserve a score of 0. Does /. score posts with a perl script that generates a random number from -1 to 5? It sure seems that way sometimes.
  • As the subject says. Intel demoed 1GHz model (what's the deal with this magic number though?), but they can't actually produce them in quantity. In fact, Intel can't produce anything above 800MHz. (And even at 800MHz there are some serious supply issues).

    AMD, OTOH, is able to produce 1GHz Athlons. You can even buy one (just check pricewatch.com), but it's pretty useless with its cache set to 1/3 the CPU speed...

    I am waiting for Thunderbirds myself. They will have on-die cache (a la Celeron or the new P3). That will boost the speed a lot. Cache is the major bottleneck in Athlon. At 500MHz, Athlon wips P3's ass by like 40% margin, but this margin quickly evaporates as the clock speed is increased -- that is due to half-speed cache of Athlons (2/5 for 800+ and 1/3 for 1000MHz), compared to full-speed cache of P3.
    ___
  • This is the first post that is SOMEWHAT on topic and it is called Redundant!
  • Yeah, I'd say there still is...unfortunately. Athlons still have a massive Achilles' Heel in how their L2 cache is clocked. If AMD could have gotten the cache speeds up to full clock like the Coppermines, any Athlon could handily spank a Coppermine at equivalent speed. Unfortunately, as the clocks get higher, the slower cache on the Athlons get apparent (see Tom's review on the 1GHz chips for evidence), and Intel starts to win the day there. But Thunderbird is coming out this summer (with any luck)...once it does, Intel is going to need some serious sh*t to stay in the market. And said sh*t is gonna hafta be released *when Intel says it is going to be released*.

  • You don't NEED a special device to overclock them. It just makes it easier.

  • Most motherboard modern BIOS setup programs have settings for the PCI bus voltage.

    Watts is in simple physics/EE terms, IIRC, roughly "volts" (potential) times "amps" (current).

    The amount of current a circuit will draw through itself is dependant on the voltage applied to it. A complicated circuit (like a microprocessor or a 3D video card) will need more current to run correctly, thus the voltage may need to be raised.

    Note that the voltage applied is not actually the voltage recieved... When a circuit draws power (current) from a power supply, if you measure the voltage output on the power supply under this load, you will notice that the voltage will drop.

  • How many revisions has Linux gone through?
  • AMD is making no garrauntees that current Athlon processors will work in SMP configurations.

  • Watch out!!! (Score:3)

    by Eneff ( 96967 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @09:01AM (#1118958)
    I'm guessing all of the Athlon advocates in here either
    A. Got a pre-built Athlon, or
    B. Installed brand name memory.

    There's a nasty little secret that I've encountered with the Athlons. You see, the Athlons are really picky with their memory. My friend and I have tried identical memory (PC100, for the record) on an AMD K6-2 350 and an Athlon. It works fine on the K6-2, but it choked on the Athlon. (It booted up, but it crashed all too often) I put back in the memory it came with and the Athlon worked fine again.

    He got run around until he found someone who told him what I'm telling you now. I've heard from another person since who has had the same experience. If you're building your own Athlon, or upgrading the memory on an existing one, go with the good stuff. (We ended up ordering the memory from Gateway. - Thus, I can't give any hints as to what to use.)

    --Eric
  • Is there any documentation freely available on the K7 optimizations?
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

  • While that's nice, an Athlon 700 it's not. The fact of the matter is that the Celerons have puny caches, and thus have a large number of faults, and they share a bus for hitting external cache so they often lock each other out. Thus when running anything that doesn't fit in cache, they spend most of their time locked and idle. I have a dual celery system, for fun, but the performance is barely equivalent to an Athlon of the same clock, let alone one of higher clock.
    ----------------------------
  • What do people do with these cars that need so much speed? The only thing i can think of are cop cars(which i can understand) or to compete in NASCAR or something. But I don't chase felons in my vehical and don't race.

    I find it just crazy to have a Ferrari.
    I can see people that really use it,
    but for the general public???

    I still think my Pinto is fast as hell.
    Is this what getting old is about?
  • The 350 Mhz patch was a problem with timing loops in the Windows code. It was Microsoft's problem, not AMD's.

    The quesion I have on compatibility is - compatibility to what? The Athlon is a supported CPU for both Windows and Linux. So the fact that it is compatible to Intel CPU's is nice to make development easier, but is almost completely irrelevant. At whatever point AMD and Intel part ways, most likely the Sledgehammer and McKinley, AMD should have as much software support as Intel does. Of course, we'll never know until it happens.
  • In theory, it makes sense because P[Watt]=U[Volt]*I[Ampere] for continuous current, while for alternate current ou just dvide the right side of the equation by two.
    However, this is a ver simplified explanation, so it's not correct because it doesn't take into consderation the internal impedance of the consumer, in this case, the graphics card. If the graphics card needs more power, it actually means it has lower internal impedance, and will, therefore, "suck" more current (I=U/R). This, on the other hand, will cause a drop of potential in the power source, affecting all the other components connected to it.
    The only solution to such problem is, therefore, not "upping the voltage" since the power source is already experiencing a voltage drop. The solution is to buy a more powerful power source, which will be able to provide the necessary current without a drop of potential.

  • The only problem I know of was a problem with Ultra speed video cards. This was a problem with the voltage regulators on the motherboards not providing enough voltage for these cards. It was not a problem with the chipset. Since then, motherboard manufacturers have started using better voltage regulators. There should never be any compatibility problems with AGP, since AMD helped to develop the AGP standard.

  • It really depends on application (Score:3)

    by RayChuang ( 10181 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @09:43AM (#1118978)
    In regards to Pentium IIIE versus Athlon CPU--the CPU that you choose really depends the application you're running.

    Most new games and multimedia applications usually take advantage of the SSE multimedia extensions on the PIII CPU, so if you're running a games like Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Flight Simulator 2000, etc. you want to get a PIIIE CPU.

    An Athlon CPU is a good choice if your game or multimedia application takes advantage of the 3DNow! multimedia extensions of the Athlon CPU, or if you are running applications that need sheer FPU processing power (e.g., CAD/CAM programs).

    It'll be very interesting to see what AMD does with the "Thunderbird" CPU due in about a month's time. If they can keep the Athlon CPU core and match it with CPU speed cache, then it will be one VERY fast CPU indeed.
  • Far more time? What?

    Intel started in 1968, AMD started in 1969. In the days of the 8086, AMD leased excess fab capacity to Intel, because they had better fab processes. AMD is over a year ahead on copper development, as well as a generation ahead on instruction pipelining.

    Intel is not hesitant to release higher megahertz. They've been trying like hell, by pushing things as far as they can. The PIII-700 was the best example. They used an architecture for it that had a known physical limitation of 690. There yields have been awful since then. They are still admitting yield problems, and have said they will be short on faster coppermines until sometime into June.

  • Re:The Athlon was right for me. (Score:3)

    by barleyguy ( 64202 ) on Friday April 21, 2000 @09:49AM (#1118981)
    The official pricebreak is on Monday, but most orderrs placed this week will get the new pricing.

    The Athlon 700 is now around $190, and the 750 is now around $245.

    So the answer is - get it anywhere, just don't buy one right before the price goes down.

    By the way, the next price break after this one is about the 12th of June. I think the 700 will probably be under $150, and the 750 will be under $200.
  • Dell has a huge advertising co-op with Intel. Intel essentially funds their advertising budget. AMD is fighting an uphill battle getting Dell.

    It has nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with money.
  • Actually, most games support 3DNow!, and Quake III runs faster on an Athlon than a PIII at the same clock speed. Also, DirectX has support for both 3DNow! and SSE, so it is even there. FPU intensive apps also perform better on Athlon, like you said. The only reason to buy a PIII would be to support SSE-only apps such as Photoshop 5.5, which run much faster on PIII because of the SSE extensions.
  • Well the guy probably had a reason for buying the 400MHz Intel vs. the AMD one, even if the AMD was cheaper. The only Intel/AMD chips available at that speed were the PII/Celerons and the K6s. Most likely, he did not want to buy the K6 and take the massive fpu performance hit that it entailed. (Seriously, Boot once said that the K6 had such bad math skills it must have gone to an inner city high school. Ouch!)
  • People don't seem to realize that the optimizing process is highly processor dependant. A program optimized for the PPro will not take full advantage of the Athlon.
    A) It can't schedule instructions properly. P6 level chips have one FPU while the Athlon has three.
    B) The Athlon can juggle many more instructions at a time, so scheduling again can't be optimized properly.
    C) The internal microarchitecture (yikes!) is very different between the two chips. I doubt the same optimizations would work for both. For example, there are two types of x86 instructions to K7 and P6 level chips, direct path and vector path. (at least that's what the athlon calls them) Instructions which can get translated directly into one macro OP for consumption by the K7 RISC internals are called direct path, and intructions that need more steps and are translated into multiple macro ops are called vector path. Different sets of instructions take the two paths in the two different chips, so the compiler can't correctly optimize the code to include mostly the direct path instructions on the P6 without hurting the performance of the K7.
  • You are so correct about the marketing. I remember seeing a quote in the Saturday Boston Globe (they run quotes of the week each Sat) that said "She not exactly Intel inside" acredited to some MIT student overheard on the subway in reference to a potential girlfriend. Powerful marketing that. I can't remember the precise date but I'll bet that intel stock went up the next monday AND that more people bought Intel hardware that next week. They do have a serious marketing presence in the general public but where is AMD? I can't think of a single instance of AMD commercials. Now how about Apple! great hardware or not they definitely have the marketing thing figured out.

    Good Marketing will beat good product any day of the week
  • The Athlon's speed advantage compared to a Pentium IIIE CPU at the same clock speed is in two parts:

    1. The Athlon has a 128 KB L1 cache. The Pentium IIIE only has a 32 KB L1 cache.

    2. The Athlon has a totally new FPU core that processes FPU and MMX instructions faster per CPU clock cycle than the Pentium IIIE (which still uses the FPU core originally developed for the Pentium Pro from 1995).

    Once the Athlon CPU picks up the integrated L2 cache running at CPU speed, I expect performance gain to be even bigger.
  • Isn't Adobe supposed to release a Photoshop filter that works in conjunction with the 3DNow! extensions soon? Quake III Arena runs fast on the Athlon because I believe part of its code will recognize the 3DNow! extensions on the Athlon CPU and use them to accelerate certain redraw functions. I believe that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 doesn't support 3DNow! currently, but that may change soon.

    What's interesting is that the most popular CAD/CAM program out there (AutoCAD) is still mostly dependent on the FPU to accelerate its performance. In that case, the Athlon's superior FPU unit will definitely be useful here.
  • Hold it right there!

    I have news for you. The SSE instruction set on the Pentium III CPU is quite a bit different than the 3DNow! instruction set on the Athlon CPU. If you write the app to take advantage of SSE it won't work on an Athlon CPU.

  • Duh. (Score:2)

    by roystgnr ( 4015 )
    Do you need an SMP system? Then you have to get a PIII. Is 90% of your work done with an SSE-enabled, non 3DNow enabled app? Then you want to get a PIII. This probably adds up to less than 5% of the computer buying public, so the continued high prices and good marketshare of the PIII baffle me. Intel marketing, I guess.

    At the moment the Athlon line is significantly (more than a hundred dollars, even including a more expensive high-end Athlon mobo) cheaper at all performance levels, and considering availability of GHz chips the Athlon line has the highest performance level.

    Now Athlon vs. Celeron vs. K6II, that's where you've got a few good choices and want to consider your individual needs. Most people today would be happier with a K6II300 and a DSL connection than they would be with a PIII850 and a modem... but thanks to marketing, they don't realize it.
  • A non-pipelined FPU in that day and age still sucked. There are some tests in which a pentium MMX beat a K6 chip on FPU tests. Whether or not the K6 was an effective implementation of a non-pipelined FPU is a moot point. Either way, it performed very poorly compared to a P6 class chip.
  • I also think that Quake supports SSE but I wouldn't bet on it. (Though it should since it is an engine that will be licensed out.)
  • What do you people do on these machines to need that much power? the only things i can think of are servers (which i can understand) or Quake 3 or something. But I don't run servers on my desktop machine and don't play Quake.

    Now why on Earth do most servers require huge processors? The only servers I've routinely run across are file servers. And what they need is fast I/O, not fast processor.

    Hell I've got one serving up files for a 50-computer (not huge, but not small) network:

    • P90
    • 64M RAM
    • DPT Century 2-channel host adapter
      • 8M ECC Cache RAM (standard)
      • i960 host processor doing RAID 0+1
    • 2 SCSI UW2 10k RPM drives
    • 3Com 905B 100bT ethernet

    When we run out of room next we'll be going RAID5 on the SCSI subsystem. RAID 0+1 right now will keep the network full and provide an up-to-the-second "backup" so if one drives goes down in flaming death we can rip it out and replace it without taking the server down.

    The second channel is for the slow shit - CD burner, tape backup, etc. - that way they don't slow down the main filestore when they are using the bus.

    Now application servers, database servers... these systems I can see requiring heavy processor and memory systems but what percentage of servers are actually doing anything but file/print sharing?

  • The feature did exist when the K6 was being designed. As I remember it, the Pentium Pro was out before the K6 (the K6 started a little after the Pentium MMX) and it had the same FPU as the PII chips. (and the PIII chips aside from the SIMD instructions.)

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