Ali and Scumbria:Thanks for your comments... good to get your views...
I'm no technical guy and I'm just learning here but rightly or wrongly, I've been influenced by the following:
www1.anandtech.com
www1.anandtech.com
These test graphs show that for large data sizes, P4/RDRAM slams Altheon pretty good...
Also, the following bit from the bottom of page 3 of these tests is interesting to me:
"It turns out that the Athlon, surprisingly enough, doesn’t follow the same design theories that were implemented with the Pentium 4. While the Athlon was built around the assumption that it would always have a high bandwidth FSB to feed the processor, it wasn’t designed around the idea of having a large amount of memory bandwidth that it could stream from. This is much like the design of the Pentium III, which although doesn’t have the same benefit of a high bandwidth FSB, it wasn’t designed around the idea of having a large amount of memory bandwidth which is why RDRAM resulted in no real performance benefit on the Pentium III. Chances are that RDRAM would have a similar effect on the Athlon as well.
The Pentium 4 on the other hand would suffer horrendously if it weren’t for its high bandwidth memory subsystem. The latency issues we noticed with RDRAM on the Pentium III platform don’t come into play too much with the Pentium 4 since the NetBurst architecture was designed around a serialized concept that RDRAM fits into perfectly. The Pentium 4’s trace cache, low latency L1, and 100MHz quad pumped FSB were all designed to interact with a high bandwidth memory subsystem, which the i850’s dual RDRAM channels are perfect for."
Well anyway... beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess.
Also, I've been influenced by the following:
theregister.co.uk
intel.com
Now, Intel may be wrong but they do have a lot swinging on it...
Apart from all the PC performance issues being discussed, while PC market is important, don't forget the probability of the even bigger future markets going to other devices including but not limited to, High Definition TV, and game stations Playstation2. Samsung and Sony are committed to RDRAM also it seems...
Cheers |
