Hi Dave B; The basic problem is that you are comparing apples(AMD) to oranges(Intel). The 1-gig Athlon processors are not comparable to the 1-gig Intel processors because of numerous differences. A fair comparison would be Intel i820 1GHz machines to Intel i815 1GHz machines, and we all know what happened in that comparison - Intel posted it on their website and the i815 beat the i820 fairly soundly.
Everyone knows that higher speed Athlons are slow due to their slow level 2 cache. The more recent AMD chips have on board cache, and are comparable in speed to the Intel ones, and these benchmarks will tend to equalize. In short, these are processor (and disk drive &c.) differences, not memory differences.
As far as bang for the buck goes, the Athlon systems are considerably cheaper than the Pentiums. The Athlons averaged $2791, while the Pentiums averaged $3584. That's 28% more expensive. The Pentium machines are more expensive for more than just the RDRAM, they undoubtedly have more expensive parts throughout. The overall system performance difference is not dominated by memory performance differences, nor is the price difference dominated by memory price differences. Basically, the article is comparing systems, not memory.
But the very article you linked to notes this:
On the surface, all five desktops share similar configurations, so you have to dig a little deeper to discover why there are such significant price differences among them. For starters, the Pentium III systems use RDRAM - a much costlier memory architecture than the more traditional SDRAM found in the Athlon systems. Still RDRAM's added expense does buy you slightly faster overall performance. As measured by Business Winstone 99, that performance gain is at most 10 percent. Is the extra money worth the small, perhaps unnoticeable, boost in speed?
zdnet.com
To reiterate: Computer shopper says that if you want to get 10% more performance, and are willing to pay 28% more money, go with the Gig RDRAM machines.
But the comparison is contrived and is already obsolete. Don't you know that Intel already dumped you? It was nearly a year ago and has been public knowledge ever since then.
-- Carl |
