<font color=red>Paul, take a look at AMD's Whitepaper on processor performance, page 9.
athlonxp.amd.com
According to the graph, we have the following data points for overall performance (with the WME patch), rating the 1.5GHz Pentium 4 as the baseline.
Pentium 4 1.5GHz - 100%
Pentium 4 1.8GHz - 113%
Athlon XP 1500+ - 121%
Athlon XP 1800+ - 130%
Nevermind the exact scores - I want to point out something else that's very interesting.
By going from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz, Intel increased Pentium 4 performance by 13%.
For the Athlon XP, by going from model 1500+ to model 1800+, AMD gained only 7.4%.
For the same increase in frequency for Intel and Quantispeed for AMD, Intel gets better scaling - and by AMD's own benchmarks! As a result, the Athlon XP 1500+ outperforms the 1.5GHz Pentium 4 by 21%, but the Athlon XP 1800+ only outperforms the 1.8GHz Pentium 4 by 15%. Look at the difference between the graph on page 14 (Athlon XP 1500+ vs Pentium 4 1.5GHz) as opposed to the graph on page 17 (Athlon XP 1800+ vs Pentium 4 1.8GHz) to confirm this visually (you may have to download the .pdf file to view it correctly).
I won't lock horns over AMD's exact scores, but the trend does suggest that if AMD continues to use their current model number scheme, Intel will eventually surpass them by scaling better. I thought you might be interested in this little observation.
wbmw
P.S. I also imagine that Northwood should reduce any kind of lead that AMD can claim with their numbers, and accelerate Intel's breakaway from AMD's faulty model numbering scheme. |
