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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jjayxxxx who wrote (32235)	3/19/2001 5:18:55 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 275872

Intel and AMD square off The latest PC processors are fast, but are they worth the expense? REVIEW BY Tom Yager 03/12/2001 [sorry if already posted, the snail mail version showed up in my mail today] The Intel system turned in a SYSmark rating of 219. The AMD system scored higher, with a 236. The margin for Athlon was consistent across multiple test runs but is too narrow to be considered decisive. A simple test to measure baseline memory performance handed Intel a narrow victory: 615 megabytes per second (M/sec) compared with 559 M/sec for AMD. The test that put the greatest distance between the systems measured disk throughput. Using a sequential file-access benchmark, the Pentium 4 system wrote data at 15.3 M/sec and read data at 29.9 M/sec. The Athlon machine’s write speed was 18.5 M/sec and its read speed was an impressive 37.7 M/sec. Keep in mind that the same IBM hard drive was used in both systems. The benchmark results suggest that core performance is a virtual tossup: the Athlon CPU computes faster, but the Pentium 4’s Rambus memory architecture transfers data to and from memory more rapidly. On balance, we rate their performance as comparable. The wider gap in disk performance suggests a potential disadvantage for Intel’s chipset. The Intel 850 chipset handles Ultra ATA/100 disk input/output (I/O) for the Pentium 4, while the AMD test system uses a blend of AMD and VIA Technologies Inc. chipsets for that purpose. This test is significant for desktop configurations, but even entry-level servers are likely to use SCSI hard drives. If disk I/O is shifted from the motherboard’s chipset to an add-in SCSI controller, this performance gap will probably evaporate..... ....Organizations that want to stock just one type of memory for all new PCs are probably better off with AMD for now; the company has no plans to use Rambus memory. However, by this time next year, Intel will support the use of DDR memory with Pentium 4 processors. fcw.com