AMD's Barton is here (Athlon XP with 512KB cache, 3000+ rating) - Page 2

Asher · February 10, 2003, 05:31

Atta boy, Mark! Rebel, rebel!

MarkG · February 10, 2003, 05:50

it's a simple price/perfomance issue

Asher · February 10, 2003, 05:52

The price delta between Intel and AMD on the high-end desktop is non-existant these days.

MarkG · February 10, 2003, 05:57

well i never shopped anything from the high-end. it's silly to buy something that will be 40% cheaper in 6 months.

Asher · February 10, 2003, 06:00

So why do you buy computers at all?

MarkG · February 10, 2003, 06:17

the silliness is reduced as the total amount you spend is also reduced. in fact, below a certain level it becomes silly not to buy something

Urban Ranger · February 10, 2003, 07:12

Quote:

Originally posted by MarkG
well i never shopped anything from the high-end. it's silly to buy something that will be 40% cheaper in 6 months.

In fact, the price on the P4 3.06GHz HT has dropped remarkably fast - from $900 to just a bit over $600 in around 2 months.

Rasbelin · February 10, 2003, 07:39

Erhhmm... the price vs. quality ballance is better for AMD's processors. IMHO.

Compare the average prices in Finland for the 4 CPUs by AMD and Intel which should in theory represent the same performance class as the competitor's model. You may notice that I get about the same perforamance for a cheaper price by AMD, plus the mobos are slightly cheaper. So that's why my choice is AMD.

Wraith · February 10, 2003, 09:44

Haven't read the review yet, but at least you're quoting a reputable source for once ^_^

--" Seeing as how the desktop Hammer chips have been delayed now (again) towards the end of 2003, things don't look too cheery for AMD again this year..."

I wouldn't go that far. The server line, Opteron, is still on track. It's quite possible that the desktop delays were to keep more production available for Opteron. Early rumors indicate it generating rather more interest than expected.

--"Both Intel and AMD have hot-as-hell processors out now for the high end."

Only one of the reasons I wouldn't ever buy the latest-released processor from any company...

--"Also, Banias (called Pentium-M formally) is going to be launched March 12th."

It will be very amusing to see how Intel handles the marketing for this after all their "Mhz Matters" advertising.

--"Hey, Asher, I'm wondering, since I've got 512 meg of RAM in my computer, do I really need a page file in WinXP or Win98?"

Not sure about 98, but from what I've seen XP (or 2K) wants at least some swap file space, no matter how much RAM you have. At 512 you can probably set it pretty low, but not totally off.

--"Nu-uh, most professionals use Microsoft Paint."

For 3D work? Right...

--"It's AMD that has a very spotty history and jumps for joy every time a chip works."

You might want to go back and check on what rev those clawhammer demo chips were...

Wraith
"It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."
- Calvin

Rasbelin · February 10, 2003, 10:38

Actually the delay seems to be caused by the fact that the introduction of DDR-II has been delayed, so AMD doesn't want to release a 64-bit CPU that uses old memory technology. But of course some of the delay might be caused by the production of Opteron CPUs.

Thue · February 10, 2003, 10:49

Quote:

Originally posted by Asher
Also, Banias (called Pentium-M formally) is going to be launched March 12th. It's an all-new processor design (first ever for a mobile chip) that shuts down parts of the chip and motherboard when not in use to save battery life.

Apparently some notebooks with Banias chips will last about 6 hours on one battery...

Performance is pretty impressive as well: http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20030205/index.html

I would be happy if they would incorporate some of these improvements into their desktop processors, instead of just going for performance at any price. For what I do my current Celeron 400 is "fast enough" (not that I won't upgrade when I have a bit more money), but I would be interested in a CPU with lower power consumption/less heat generation/small fan required.

Wraith · February 10, 2003, 11:01

--"Typical Thermal Power P4 3.06GHz: 81 W
Typical Thermal Power Athlon XP 3000+: 74.3 W"

Asher, if you got these from Ace's you've misread their table.

They list 74.3W as the max power for the Athlon (typical as 58.4 W) and 81W as the typical power for the P4 (with +/- 105 W as the max).

--"I was slightly surprised by how much the Athlon got hammered in the SpecViewPerf benchmarks, though."

You're also being disingenuous here. Ace's concludes that the difference is in the Quadro driver optimizations (heavily P4, not at all for Athlon), not in the processor.
Note that they say:

Quote:

And if you investigate the reviews which feature SPEC Viewperf and use a Geforce 4 Ti4600 as the OpenGL videocard, you will see that the Athlon will beat a similar Pentium 4 in many situations.

Wraith
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
-- Isaac Asimov

Asher · February 10, 2003, 11:25

Quote:

Originally posted by Wraith
I wouldn't go that far. The server line, Opteron, is still on track. It's quite possible that the desktop delays were to keep more production available for Opteron. Early rumors indicate it generating rather more interest than expected.

The Server Line won't help AMD much, it'll help some.

But I remember hearing about how much Athlon MP was going to do for the company, and that tanked pretty badly in terms of sales. I wonder how many companies will actually adopt Opteron seeing how poor support AMD has given to Athlon MP...

Quote:

Not sure about 98, but from what I've seen XP (or 2K) wants at least some swap file space, no matter how much RAM you have. At 512 you can probably set it pretty low, but not totally off.

With a couple of registry entry changes, you can turn off the pagefile and it'll keep all of the OS files in the RAM.

Quote:

For 3D work? Right...

I guess I should have been more obviously sarcastic.

Asher · February 10, 2003, 11:29

Quote:

Originally posted by Rasbelin
Actually the delay seems to be caused by the fact that the introduction of DDR-II has been delayed, so AMD doesn't want to release a 64-bit CPU that uses old memory technology. But of course some of the delay might be caused by the production of Opteron CPUs.

I thought DDR-II was delayed because there's no desktop chips that'd use it.

DDR-II is in production at very high clock speeds (GeForce FX uses it at 500MHz * 2 = 1GHz), much more than the DDR-II for desktop would require. Intel doesn't plan to support it until the end of the year on the desktop either. And since neither AMD nor Intel will support it till year-end, it was delayed...

Asher · February 10, 2003, 11:33

Quote:

Originally posted by Wraith
Asher, if you got these from Ace's you've misread their table.

They list 74.3W as the max power for the Athlon (typical as 58.4 W) and 81W as the typical power for the P4 (with +/- 105 W as the max).

Oops. I could have sworn I had the figures right, but the table disagrees with me right now.

Quote:

You're also being disingenuous here. Ace's concludes that the difference is in the Quadro driver optimizations (heavily P4, not at all for Athlon), not in the processor.
Note that they say:

That's all well and good, but if the Quadro drivers have SSE2 optimizations or something like that to help give the P4 a huge boost, the lack of SSE2 in the Athlon XP isn't really an excuse for the lack of performance.

And if the recent Quadro drivers provide a large boost like that, it's only a matter of time before Nvidia brings that down to their UDA for consumer chips...

Wraith · February 10, 2003, 12:16

--"The Server Line won't help AMD much, it'll help some."

Sure it will. The margins are much higher in this area. Any significant marketshare gain in this area will help AMD's profits quite a bit, while eroding one of Intel's highest margin lines.

--"But I remember hearing about how much Athlon MP was going to do for the company"

It probably would have done better if AMD had stayed in the chipset business. Still, it gave them a bit of a foothold in the market. Newisys has already announced Opteron systems, and it's not at all unlikely that IBM will be selling them as well. If a Tier 1 vendor like IBM does support the line, AMD will gain marketshare quickly.

--"With a couple of registry entry changes, you can turn off the pagefile and it'll keep all of the OS files in the RAM."

Does that work with 2k as well? I'd love to force the bugger to stop paging stuff to disk when it's got plenty of RAM open.

--"the lack of SSE2 in the Athlon XP isn't really an excuse for the lack of performance."

You're a programmer, you should know there's a whole lot more to the driver optimizations than just SSE2. At present, most Quadros are sold with P4-based workstations, so it's only sense to focus the optimizations on it. This is not true of their GeForce line (which likely does have any SSE2 optimizations they can use in the P4 data path, but also has the appropriate Athlon optimizations).

Wraith
"If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway."

Urban Ranger · February 10, 2003, 23:03

It might also be possible that AMD delays the Clawhammer to squeeze more life for the Athlon.

Asher · February 11, 2003, 02:51

Quote:

Originally posted by Wraith
Does that work with 2k as well? I'd love to force the bugger to stop paging stuff to disk when it's got plenty of RAM open.

Yeah, it does. It works on Windows 2000 and XP only.

I've been told by some people that you don't even need to do a registry tweak to do it, just select "No Page File" on the memory management screen and it should handle itself.

Quote:

You're a programmer, you should know there's a whole lot more to the driver optimizations than just SSE2. At present, most Quadros are sold with P4-based workstations, so it's only sense to focus the optimizations on it. This is not true of their GeForce line (which likely does have any SSE2 optimizations they can use in the P4 data path, but also has the appropriate Athlon optimizations).

Yes, there's a whole ton of stuff they can optimize on the Pentium 4 in addition to SSE2, but the largest benefit to performance in professional 3D applications is made possible with SSE2. Isn't the Specviewperf benchmarks dealing with 64-bit floats? That'd definitely explain why the P4 would do better -- SSE2 supports 2 x 64-bit floats, Athlon doesn't have SSE2 and can only do 1 64-bit float.

Rasbelin · February 11, 2003, 02:58

Urban,

well, I assume you could be right as they have to delay the Athlon 64, if they want to utilise the new Barton core more effectively, because it lifespan would be quite short if the Athlon 64 would be released soon.

Asher,

I assume you're right about that chipset issue.

Wraith · February 11, 2003, 09:29

--"I've been told by some people that you don't even need to do a registry tweak to do it"

I've heard a lot about problems with this method, which is why I haven't done it. Oh well, more research I guess. Maybe I'll just pick a sacrificial box and give it a try.

--"Isn't the Specviewperf benchmarks dealing with 64-bit floats?"

I don't know the details of the program, so I'm not going to be able to answer that. However, this is a workstation card. I don't see why their driver optimizations would give up accuracy for speed. That's the kind of thing you do for a gaming card. I'd expect they'd stick with the 80 bit x87 as much as possible.

And that, again, is not all of the story. The P4 requires a completely different set of optimizations. Some of the operations the P3 and the Athlon are good at suck donkey nuts on the P4, and vice versa. If they ran the drivers with all the P4 optimizations and nothing else there'd still be a major speed difference without SSE2.

--"because it lifespan would be quite short if the Athlon 64 would be released soon."

This could be part of it. Intel actually doesn't have a whole lot of speed increases on their immediate roadmap. The P4 is hitting the wall on the .13 process as far as power consumption goes. They might be able to get another speed grade or two out of it, but they've already had to beef up the cooling and power requirements. I can't see them ramping the speed much until they finish their process change.
Given that, Barton's probably good enough for now in the desktop area. Getting the Opterons out is more important.

Also I've seen some rumors flying around suggesting that AMD is having trouble working with the SOI process for speed. Their yields are fine, but the speedbinning isn't what they want. This would make sense, too.

Of course, very few people outside AMD know what's really going on. Doubt we'll ever find out.

Wraith
Everything is going to be alright - for varying values of alright

Asher · February 11, 2003, 14:05

Quote:

Originally posted by Wraith
I don't know the details of the program, so I'm not going to be able to answer that. However, this is a workstation card. I don't see why their driver optimizations would give up accuracy for speed. That's the kind of thing you do for a gaming card. I'd expect they'd stick with the 80 bit x87 as much as possible.

I've been told by a couple of people that using 80-bit x87 precision is actually quite rare, especially on crossplatform programs like SPECViewPerf, which would most likely be a standard 64-bit float.

Of course we don't know either way.

Quote:

And that, again, is not all of the story. The P4 requires a completely different set of optimizations. Some of the operations the P3 and the Athlon are good at suck donkey nuts on the P4, and vice versa. If they ran the drivers with all the P4 optimizations and nothing else there'd still be a major speed difference without SSE2.

That's true, the instructions that took the largest beating in terms of moving from P3 to P4 are the shifting ones, IIRC. Much slower.