Fyo, Re: "overall - even taking "new", optimized benchmarks into consideration - a 1.8GHz P4 seems pretty much equal to a 1.4GHz Athlon in performance"
I've read quite a few of those Pentium 4 reviews across a wide range of applications. When an optimized app is used, the Athlon falls prey to even the 1.5GHz or 1.7GHz Pentium 4 speed grades. On rare occasions, the Pentium 4 performs better on a "per clock" basis, but on average, optimized apps on the Pentium 4 seem to lag the Athlon by about 100-300MHz. However, the Athlon isn't likely to narrow the gap to less than 300MHz in the near future, and as more optimized applications show up, the Pentium 4 will become that much more compelling. It used to be the running joke that only Quake III showed a preference to the Pentium 4, but now it's much more.
On the other end of the spectrum, those DP FP apps like 3D renderers, tend to favor the Athlon by a large margin. Even once these applications are optimized, the 2.0GHz Pentium 4 just barely falls short of the 1.4GHz Athlon, but on the other hand, very few consumers are interested in the level of 3D rendering that those packages can offer. This makes the Athlon a great graphics workstation, if AMD can market it well as that, but consumer level 3D realtime rendering performs much better on the Pentium 4.
wanna_bmw |
