Greg:
Heya. A quick comment or two to your recent post:
> > Is there a significant performance penalty when using a Celeron or
> > Duron processor vs an Athlon or Pentium. Not just in speed but in in
> > the ability to process.
>
> This is a really broad question. It all depends on what you want to
> do. I read a performance review on www.tomshardware.com. I don't recall
> the link but the data is almost a year old. It influenced how I look at
> hardware now.
I know the feeling. THG influenced the way that I look
at *benchmarks*. Each of them (and there are many; typically THG's
site uses a dozen or so different benchmarks when the review or
compare & contrast multiple systems) is essentially restricted from
demonstrating infinite performance because of a system bottleneck.
That is, typically just one thing in the system will holdback a
system's performance in any given benchmark. This could be cache
size, FSB speed, CPU MHz, northbridge chipset vendor, memory bus
bandwidth, memory latency, graphics card speed, etc.
So the best way to see how "good" a system is is to run it
against multiple benchmarks which evaluate performance against multiple
bottlenecks. Then you can make an informed decision about where to
spend your money to "go after" the cheapest bottleneck. I'd agree
with what Tom said: for sub-1GHz machines, the most bang for a buck
can most often be had by upgrading the graphics card.
> Tom's Hardware has made other comparisons. He has found Duron and
> Athlon's out perform Intel chips. I get the picture that the food chain
> looks like celeron, pentium, duron, athlon...this is a genralization.
> The other problem when looking at speed is that Intel use this a
> marketing tool. AMD chips perform better at lower speeds suggesting
> that "the ability to process" is held by AMD chips.
You could start a religious war here. :) THG does a fairly
good job of reporting about which systems are currently the top-dog
at a given price target. I'd agree that AMD holds the lead here.
However, THG also overclocks whatever they can get their hands on,
to see whose system has more game left in it. In this category, Intel's
P4 is out in front (though you'd pay more it).
Also, I understand that there are multiple "reporters" who
work for THG, and they each have their personal preferences. I
recall reading one who was upset about paying $15 more for a stick
of RDRAM than DDR SDRAM, but thought paying $20 more for CAS=2
memory instead of CAS=2.5 memory was "well worth it". Shrug.
Lastly, surely both Intel and AMD use performance numbers as
marketing tools: Intel boasts that they have the fastest CPU frequency,
and AMD boasts that their design does more work per clock cycle so it
doesn't matter. They're competitors approaching a big market in two
different manners (Intel wants to own the high-margin Performance
Desktop segment, while AMD wants to own the high-volume Mainstream
Desktop segment), so I'm not surprised that there's marketing and
positioning. I'd greatly prefer the spend their monies on that than
on, say, more Blue Man Group advertisements. :)
cheers,
Scott
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