p4 too slow ?

[shIva]

some u.s. guys want the court to decide, if the pentium 4 is too slow. Full story here (pcworld.com)

now they really go crazy ;-)

[kd7ota]

AMD all the way!  :-D

[Tomas]

I have one p4 1800mhz sitting here, one amd 1.4ghz both has sdram 133mhz, the p4 is way slower than the amd, even the ram BW is lower, though the p4 has 400mhz fsb... While the athlon has only 266. That tells something about how crappy those p4 chips is.  I bet if i was able too clock an k6 too 1800mhz it would outperform the poor p4

[jumpship]

At work we have a poster (from Intel) promoting how good the P4 is. It
states that in overall tests the 2GHz P4 and 1.5 times faster then the
1GHz P3.... Er, so that means that if I were able to clock the P3 to
2GHz it would run FASTER then the P4, how does that make the P4
better? :-?

Mind you, most of the customers who come into the store really
wouldn't know better anyway so would be fooled by this "marketing".

JS

[SilvrDrgn]

In the article to which the link from the original posting of this thread points, there is this text:

"For example, in a recent test of each company's top CPUs, a system with Intel's 2.53-GHz P4 edged past a PC with an Athlon XP 2100+ chip (running at 1.73 GHz) in PC WorldBench 4. "

Whoever did this comparison is a bonehead.  The AMD 2100+ is meant to be compared to P4 at approximately 2.1 GHz, not a 2.53 GHz part.  By the measure of this test, it again suggests that AMD is better in the wording "edges past" (i.e. it takes a 2.53 GHz P4 to beat a 2100+ Athlon).  Friggen goofy, and another reason to throw out the MHz/GHz measurements.

[createcoms]

The XP2100+ IS NOT a rating for which it's equal P4 counterpart.

The ratings are for how fast the older T-Bird would have to run in order to equal the performance of the XP.  This is somehow comparable unofficially to the P4, but the rating holds no direct relevance to the P4 or intel would sue their ass!

[asian1]

Hi
This is a difficult case and I doubt they will win the case. In the end only the lawyers are laughing. The speed also depend on optimization.  Consider Pentium Pro vs Pentium case. On 16 bit (Win 3.1) applications, Pentium I beat Pentium Pro. But on 32 bit (Win 95) applications, Pentium Pro is the winner!

The same program optimized for P.IV may run faster than similar program on P.III and the case will be turned down by the judge. Similar with P.IV vs AMD. Its depend on optimization.

[ikir]

@ jumpship

ah ah ah! Fun!

[Munchkin]

I think this says more about the american system than the actual case in itself.

If you're unhappy about something you go to court. Doesn't matter if you have been misled or if you're really to ignorant to actually check the facts.

This is one of the two reasons that I would never even consider moving to that country. Sadly enough we're going that way here too, so I guess I have to move to another country where this madness hasn't spread in a while.

This doesn't mean I'm an intel-supporter, rather the opposite. But the whole thing is ridiciolus. :-?

[shIva]

so I guess I have to move to another country where this madness hasn't spread in a while.

here some people turn that way, too. i think the only place to live without these will be outer space (ie. the moon could be a rather good place :-D )

[KennyR]

This has been common knowledge for some time. Many PC users said that the best Pentium was III, and of course its pretty obvious AMD CPUs were always faster MHz to MHz. And of course, a CPU that struggles to match a G4 clocked at half the cycles is in severe trouble. Combine that with legacy segmented memory addressing and an idiotic interrupt system fit only for the trash, I'm glad Amiga went the PPC route. Ok, they went there half-assed, but they went there.

Recently I bought a CD-RW drive that said "Absolutely minimum specs: 350MHz pentium." Well, it runs just fine on a 040/25, with no problems. I begin to think that the PC universe is MHz in the head. Lets hope the Amiga community doesn't go there too (though I fear many already have).

[Kronos]

Combine that with legacy segmented memory addressing

So you want to run DOS6+Win3.x on a P4 ?

Cause that was the last M$-OS running in "real mode".

[Graak]

So you want to run DOS6+Win3.x on a P4 ?

It'd be interesting to know if that would work at all :-)

[shIva]

So you want to run DOS6+Win3.x on a P4 ?

for this reason even the new 64bit hammer has got funny things like the well known a20 gate ...

[KennyR]

Segemented memory addressing makes assembly language a nightmare, so the current situation is that high level language compilers are compiled by other high level compilers, and software doesn't get the asm optimisation it should. Therefore, x86 software gets slower, more bloated and less efficient as time goes on. I compiled HelloWorld.c on visual basic with a fairly basic set of includes in uni and it was 56KB. Combine this inefficiency with the huge instruction decoding time of the x86 and you have a CPU that is propped up only by mounting clock speeds and bigger coolers. Er, no thanks.

On the other hand, PPC asm is a comparitive breeze. The exe's are big, because it is RISC code and needs more instructions, but its a great deal more efficient. It doesn't have 200 extra instructions no-one ever uses, so the decoding time is measured in picoseconds rather that nanoseconds. PPC is a lot better than x86, period.