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

To: Elmer who wrote (52569)	8/27/2001 3:36:00 AM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 275872

Elmer, Re: "Anyone who clings to this notion that Athlon is still the performance leader is too far out of touch to produce an objective review." I don't think that's true. Tech Report made an excellent review for the Pentium 4 2.0GHz, and they go into the right details to show that they know what they're talking about, and not propagating Internet myths. The performance of the Athlon from a technical perspective is still superior to most Pentium 4 speed grades. Academically, you wouldn't be far off if you said that the Athlon offers the best performance, but the Pentium 4 offers the best potential. But even that review can read the writing on the wall, when they admit that AMD has an uphill battle. AMD can claim victory on those processor level tests that run inside the cache, and stress the processor core. Pentium 4, however, wins on the system level tests that more accurately show real life requirements. When a consumer desires the purchase of a computer, they will be running the mpeg encoding, the games, the Internet connectivity, and the multi-tasking productivity that the Pentium 4 excels at. Academics who play with old Povray and ScienceMark binaries will wonder why the Athlon isn't mopping the floor with the Pentium 4, but it will soon become obvious that Joe Consumer doesn't give a hoot about those tests, and just wants to play Diablo II and burn audio CDs in the fastest way possible. So while academia can argue over the merits of each processor micro-architecture, Intel will be selling off of the same metric that has buyers have always gone goo-goo over: megahertz. Except this time, Intel will also have a reason to claim the fastest desktop processor in the world. wanna_bmw

To: Elmer who wrote (52569)	8/27/2001 3:41:12 AM
From: jcholewa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

> Don't waste any more time on this one. Anyone who clings > to this notion that Athlon is still the performance leader > is too far out of touch to produce an objective review. I think you're jumping the gun a bit here. First off, the article's conclusion is that the Pentium 4 is the performance leader. Secondly, before the P4-2.00, the fastest Pentium 4 operated at 1.80GHz. Most comparisons using a wide variety of benchmarks at the very least put this and the 1.40GHz Athlon in the same general ballpark, performance-wise. It is completely reasonable for some reviews to conclude that the P4-1.80 is faster than the Tbird-1.40 and it is equally reasonable for some reviews to conclude that the P4-1.80 is slower than the Tbird-1.40, especially since different websites vary in their choice of benchmarks. Now, Tech Report happens to be one of the places in which the benchmarks average out such that the 1.40GHz Thunderbird/Athlon outperforms the 1.80GHz Pentium 4 in general. That you could say based on this that the reviewer is "too far out of touch" shows that you are being quite rude and inconsiderate. I should point out that this particular reviewer went out of his way to contact Intel and nVidia when he came to a point where the P4 was performing oddly. As a result, he was able to obtain necessary drivers to fix certain OpenGL related quirks in spec ViewPerf. If he were "too far out of touch", there would be no way that he would do something like this. What he did here is called "being fair to all parties". Additionally, I should point out that in his rendering test he was willing to use unofficial Intel v5.0 compiled binaries in order to give the Netburst microarchtecture a better chance of competing in that category. Though the P4 still did not win in this particular area, it is still a testament to this person's good intentions that he was willing to forgo actual release binaries in favour of those that show the new chip in a stronger light. Frankly, I think your attitude about this review is based on an unwillingness to really give it a chance. I know at least one engineer inside Intel who has been singing its praises (especially about the OpenGL thing). I guess you're just too much of a 'Droid to be fair about these things. -JC