🚀 go-pugleaf

You don't make points with bad facts. Floating-point performance on an
Athlon XP is faster than an equivalent Pentium 4, not slower. It does media
encoding better, not worse. Check the benchmarks in cpu reviews at the major
hardware sites and see for yourself.

Here's one one media encoding that shows the P4 2 ghz tied with an XP 2000+
(which runs at 1.67 ghz,) and beaten by a 2100+ (that runs at 1.73 ghz.)
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1595&p=8

Here's one that shows the Athlon's raw fpu supremacy in rendering with 3D
Studio Max, the XP 2100+ at 1.73 ghz beats the Northwood P4 2.2 ghz chip by
a noticeable 6 percent. http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1595&p=9 The
comparison database for one common benchmarking tool, Sysoft Sandra, shows a
default P4 2.0 with a raw Whetstone fpu score of 1122. The XP 2000+ in the
same database is listed at 2547. The only way the P4 can top the Athlon in
floating point is when the software is specifically coded to support SSE2,
on a level playing field the Athlon wins every time.

There are plenty of other comparisons scattered all over the web that
support the same conclusions. Check them out for yourself.

The P4 is not as great a cpu as many would have you believe. Shortcuts were
taken in the design to allow it to ramp quickly to higher clock speeds. I
once saw a comparison where a P4, a P3 and an Athlon were all clocked to the
same 1 ghz speed for a test. The Athlon swept the tests, because it
processes more instructions per clock cycle. The P3 actually beat the P4
because it was more efficient at lower speeds. The P4's architecture and
Intel's unparalled fabbing ability have allowed them to top the 3 ghz mark
while AMD is struggling to get the XPs much beyond 2 ghz, and Intel has paid
a handful of software developers to incorporate SSE2 to make up for its
SLOWER fpu performance.

"You pays your money and you takes your choice," as Popeye used to say. But
knowing the facts makes the choice simpler. To get the biggest bang for the
buck in the apps and games most consumers use, AMD makes more sense -- all
IMHO, of course.


"Alan Shepherd" <sp...@awshepherd.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:XpGX9.1075$Ne7.7910514@news-text.cableinet.net...
> I love this comparison - many people may say that when I went from a 1.2
> Duron to a 2000+ XP CPU I should of seen a speed increase of about 66%, in
> reality - it was less, one program Seti@Home (very CPU intensive) only saw
> an increase of 35%, and many other benchmarks were limited to the speed of
> other parts of the PC.
>
> Video encoding again only a saw speed increase of about 35%. Again, CPU
> intensive, is this due to the limited FP Unit on the XP CPU's? Genuinely
> there are many programs which are not running at the equal 2GHz P4.
>
> But AMD use the "Office and Gaming" speed benchmarks - who needs a faster
> Wordprocessor that's already ridiculously fast? As to Databases and
> Spreadsheets, the first is often limited by the HDD speed, and the 2nd by
> the speed of the XP's FP unit....
>
> Have I made my point?
>
>
>