Dan, Re: "Intel required 40% more clocks plus a completely new chip 2.5 times as large to get the improvement AMD got from a major stepping of a chip made slightly larger and running at the same clock speed as the old chip."
I'll agree that many legacy applications require 40% more frequency just to get near equal performance on the Pentium 4 over the Pentium III, but you are ignoring several major differences.
First, the Pentium 4 can reach nearly 2x the frequency of the Pentium III on the same process. A 2.0GHz Pentium 4 has 43% more frequency over a 1.4GHz Pentium 4, and some great scaling, besides. At least much better scaling than the Pentium III. For this 43% alone, it was worth the redesign.
Second, newer applications take much more advantage of the Pentium 4, thus widening the gap between Pentium III and Pentium 4 performance. When Intel released the Pentium III at 500MHz, it was only 5-10% faster than the Pentium II at 450MHz. Barely worth it. But later on, newer applications supporting SSE allowed the 500MHz Pentium III to have up to 75% greater performance over the 450MHz Pentium II (as reported in testing Microsoft Media Encoder, once it was given SSE optimizations). I know what you're going to say, and I know that not every application under the Sun received these optimizations, but the ones that people used the most, such as games, video, graphics, and Internet applications, received a majority of these optimizations. It's too bad that no more reviews would test out systems so old any more, because I think you'd find that the Pentium III 500MHz has a huge advantage over the Pentium II at 450MHz with today's applications.
Next year, the same is bound to happen for the Pentium 4. There are already a ton of applications that support SSE-2, and even some who don't, but support cleaner code that maximizes performance. You saw how many applications on your link showed a 20% improvement in the Pentium 4 1.4GHz over the Pentium III 1GHz. Add up to a 43% scaling advantage by going to 2.0GHz, and the Pentium 4 offers a huge improvement over the Pentium III. Well worth the effort of redesigning.
And one other advantage that the Pentium 4 has, at least right now, is that it is stomping on Athlon sales right now, forcing AMD to price their Athlon CPUs down to a lower price than what they were selling Durons for last year. Intel is giving the public what they want, and that is more megahertz. How is AMD going to compete with that, even if their chip were to have a huge advantage in overall performance?
wanna_bmw |
