Multitasking

[burningrave101]

Yep I just showed you a cheaper CPU thats running over 1ghz slower is beating or damn tied the P4's in those certain benchmarks. If you look at the whole review you see the AMD's beat the P4's in pretty much all the benchmarks.


I rest my case.
P4 is bloated and discontinued. intel is moving on with the Pentium M and dual cores.

There you go again going COMPLETELY off topic to try and prove a point that has no point. This thread is about multitasking. It isn't about anything else but that. If you can't comprehend that then just click on the little X at the top of the page and stop replying.

The reviews you have linked to do NOT show the Athlon 64 to be better than the Pentium 4 at multitasking. And you know what? Your not going to find any reviews that show that because the Athlon 64 can't beat the Pentium 4 in that area.

Take a look at the review i just linked to at Tech Report. Its a recent review that covers a wide range of benchmarks instead of just a handful that primarily consist of gaming benchmarks.

The Pentium 4 Prescott chips aren't any more expensive then an Athlon 64 so there is no real price advantage by going with AMD any more.

You just can't seem to understand that there is no "fastest CPU" until that processor is capable of doing EVERYTHING faster then every other CPU. And currently the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 are both far from it. They are both very fast and they both have their strong and weak points. The CPU thats better is the one that is the fastest for the extent of the games and applications you run.

Well said.

Its always well said when its something positive about AMD and something negative about Intel lol.

 

[sabrewolf732]

There you go again going COMPLETELY off topic to try and prove a point that has no point. This thread is about multitasking. It isn't about anything else but that. If you can't comprehend that then just click on the little X at the top of the page and stop replying.

The reviews you have linked to do NOT show the Athlon 64 to be better than the Pentium 4 at multitasking. And you know what? Your not going to find any reviews that show that because the Athlon 64 can't beat the Pentium 4 in that area.

Take a look at the review i just linked to at Tech Report. Its a recent review that covers a wide range of benchmarks instead of just a handful that primarily consist of gaming benchmarks.

The Pentium 4 Prescott chips aren't any more expensive then an Athlon 64 so there is no real price advantage by going with AMD any more.



Its always well said when its something positive about AMD and something negative about Intel lol.

I dont see a prescott 2.8 for $120, or a prescott 3GHz for $139. AMD still has pricing advantage. Althought a 2.4c for $130 with a $100 alby mobo with pcie and a $175 6600gt lookin mighty attractive

 

[burningrave101]

I dont see a prescott 2.8 for $120, or a prescott 3GHz for $139. AMD still has pricing advantage. Althought a 2.4c for $130 with a $100 alby mobo with pcie and a $175 6600gt lookin mighty attractive

The price difference between Intel and AMD is pretty small right now.

An LGA 775 3.4E retail is running $279 while the A64 3500+ 90nm retail is $295 at newegg. An OEM A64 3000+ 90nm is $155 while the LGA 775 3.0E retail is $179.

 

[NEVERLIFT]

The price difference between Intel and AMD is pretty small right now.

An LGA 775 3.4E retail is running $279 while the A64 3500+ 90nm retail is $295 at newegg. An OEM A64 3000+ 90nm is $155 while the LGA 775 3.0E retail is $179.

I would not have a Prescott
They run hot and throttle. I would rather have a regular P4C Norhtwood than a POS Prescott.

 

[PureBooYah]

I would not have a Prescott
They run hot and throttle. I would rather have a regular P4C Norhtwood than a POS Prescott.

what do you think AMD's Cool & Quiet feature does??? It throttles the cpu, throttling is a feature a lot of people like on both sides because it reduces heat when they don't need to use all of the cpu. New revision of prescotts run a lot cooler now too.

and i'm still waiting on some kind of proof that the A64 is better at multitasking.

 

[NEVERLIFT]

what do you think AMD's Cool & Quiet feature does??? It throttles the cpu, throttling is a feature a lot of people like on both sides because it reduces heat when they don't need to use all of the cpu. New revision of prescotts run a lot cooler now too.

and i'm still waiting on some kind of proof that the A64 is better at multitasking.

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=630

You dont see AMD's cpu's running hot and throttling even in a game.

 

[Dew]

Thats funny I use CCE or DVDShrink and dont have any problems when encoding. Yes I dont recommend going and playing any Farcry or Doom3 but my pc is far from slow to respond or sluggish.

That, ladies and gents, says it all.

SOURCE: http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njc1LDY=

Multitasking

Every time I write about how Intel Pentium 4 CPUs with HyperThreading dominate in multitasking, I get mad email from AMD fans telling me otherwise. I have had a Pentium 4 CPU in my main work system, which is used for everything I do including gaming, for a couple of years till back in July. I put in an Athlon 64 FX-53 to compare real-world experiences. The difference in how multitasking is handled is much like night and day. Intel’s HyperThreading makes easy work of multitasking where the Athlon 64 simply flounders. I was used to encoding movies and music while I went about my normal work tasks and the Athlon FX system was having none of that. I found many places where the system would “chug” due to the CPU handling one task while I had another one I wanted to focus on. Sure, you can go in and change the way the CPU handles the particular tasks you have open, but that is simply a pain to get done every time you want to use certain combinations of software.

SOURCE: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mzg4LDQ=

Adding that Quake III botmatch into the mix stuttered the non-HT processors terribly while rendering our Photoshop file. The 3.06HT processor remained fluid throughout the rendering process, clearly showing the benefit of Hyper-Threading.

The point is that because of HT you can play Farcry or Doom3 smoothly. Belittle the P4 w/HT all you want, it DOES help and it does make the P4 better than the A64 when it comes to multitasking. This is coming from a P4 to A64 convert. I don't need the extra multitasking abilities, but I do notice the difference if I happen to be encoding DVDs. AMD has the superior single thread platform at this time, Intel has the superior multithread platform(Refering to single CPU socket systems).

Thank you, Neverlift, for making everyone's point for them, as hard as you tried to avoid it.

 

[Josh_B]

I realize you really like AMD and all but i just went from a Pentium 4 3.0c to an Athlon 64 3500+ 90nm and the Pentium 4 OWNZ the Athlon 64 in multitasking abilities.

HyperThreading only affects performance in multithreaded environments and multitasking.

If your a hardcore gamer then the Athlon 64 is the best choice. If you multitask heavy and run productivity software then your better off with a Pentium 4 w/ HyperThreading because alot of popular applications in use today are multithreaded to improve performance on dual processor and HyperThreading configurations. They are also optimized for SSE/SSE2 so FPU performance plays little part.

1. I seriously doubt that a P4 3.0 is going to beat a 3500+ at anything besides encoding. (Even then, the compression apps. seem to go back and forth as to which CPU they like better. (Generally.)) Any chance you could post some benchmarks?

2. While it is true that Hyperthreading really only benefits applications with more than a single thread, it also hurts some applications as well. Remember that the desktop P4's, at least from what I've read, always had HT functionality on die, but it wasn't turned on until intel could figure out how to reduce the performance hit in some applications when HT was enabled.

3. Athlon 64's have SSE2 as well; what's your point? The Athlon 64/Opteron's SSE2 implementation is generally pretty decent, and it does EXTREMELY well in packed SSE2, but not as well in scalar mode.

I think most people need to take a double-blind test to find out if they can actually tell the difference between a P4 and an Athlon64 of roughly equivalent ratings.

 

[Josh_B]

what do you think AMD's Cool & Quiet feature does??? It throttles the cpu, throttling is a feature a lot of people like on both sides because it reduces heat when they don't need to use all of the cpu. New revision of prescotts run a lot cooler now too.

and i'm still waiting on some kind of proof that the A64 is better at multitasking.

They only run significantly cooler when idle. Otherwise, temps are nearly the same.

 

[NEVERLIFT]

I dont think Quake 3 is up there with FarCry or Doom3... hell I can multi-task with a old P3 and still run that old game!

 

[Tazman2]

what do you think AMD's Cool & Quiet feature does??? It throttles the cpu, throttling is a feature a lot of people like on both sides because it reduces heat when they don't need to use all of the cpu. New revision of prescotts run a lot cooler now too.

and i'm still waiting on some kind of proof that the A64 is better at multitasking.

AMD's cool & quiet throttles to save power and lower heat when not in use which btw u can turn off and most people do turn it off including me! The Prescotts throttle at stock speeds because they overheat... theres a difference between a feature and a crappy design!

 

[stavroguine]

I have not tried P4 with HT, but I'm really surprised to hear that multi-application feels smoother, because it's not the kind of things HT is meant to help.
At cpu level switching from a task to another is a matter of microseconds, not something you are able to see at user level.
But... maybe the reason is more in the windows scheduler, which does thing differently when facing a HT processor.
There has been a lot of discussions and works in the linux kernel in this area : making the system feels more "responsive" to user without hurting performance of cpu intensive tasks.

 

[Tazman2]

I have not tried P4 with HT, but I'm really surprised to hear that multi-application feels smoother, because it's not the kind of things HT is meant to help.
At cpu level switching from a task to another is a matter of microseconds, not something you are able to see at user level.
But... maybe the reason is more in the windows scheduler, which does thing differently when facing a HT processor.
There has been a lot of discussions and works in the linux kernel in this area : making the system feels more "responsive" to user without hurting performance of cpu intensive tasks.

Or its just fluff. Like the fluff in a civic owners mind that his fart pipe made his car fast!

 

[freddiepm61]

why would anyone want to be enciding mp3, div x, doing an ftp, downloading and playing a high performance game at the same time?

 

[Tazman2]

why would anyone want to be enciding mp3, div x, doing an ftp, downloading and playing a high performance game at the same time?

Because they have no life so for the 20 hours that they are up sitting at the computer they have to make sure to use that time effectivily!

 

[Elios]

Well said.

I foresee both intel and AMD doing socket changes and rolling out the dual core's.


I'm just curious why the prescott's are so cheap now? They run hotter and seem to throttle the cpu at the drop of a hat. I asked about this in another post and I wonder if anyone here can shed some light on this?
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=630

Is there away to turn off the throttling or stop it? I dont want a cpu that throttles even when your gaming and runs so hot it has to throttle to stay cool.

AMD has already stated that Dual core will only need a BIOS update to 939 and 940 mobos as for intel that has yet to be seen but it will require a MOBO swap for them most likely as the AMD has the mem controler on die and will have each core just run single channel for the 939's think the 940s are the same way
as intel chips need memory badnwith out the ass to keep them feed a new chipset will be need but i think the socket well stay the same

 

[Ollin]

Well I went from a 3200+ AMDXP to a Intel 3.0E and I do notice a big difference in being able to multitask. The Intel does take the XP on multitasking but when I play games I notice a 5-8FPS drop compared to the XP.

 

[NEVERLIFT]

Or its just fluff. Like the fluff in a civic owners mind that his fart pipe made his car fast!

I love it! I could not have said better.

 

[burningrave101]

I would not have a Prescott
They run hot and throttle. I would rather have a regular P4C Norhtwood than a POS Prescott.

The newer revisions for Prescott are achieving better temps and they perform just fine. They have 1MB L2 cache, SSE3, and they overclock very well. People are able to hit 4Ghz on just aircooling.

1. I seriously doubt that a P4 3.0 is going to beat a 3500+ at anything besides encoding. (Even then, the compression apps. seem to go back and forth as to which CPU they like better. (Generally.)) Any chance you could post some benchmarks?

2. While it is true that Hyperthreading really only benefits applications with more than a single thread, it also hurts some applications as well. Remember that the desktop P4's, at least from what I've read, always had HT functionality on die, but it wasn't turned on until intel could figure out how to reduce the performance hit in some applications when HT was enabled.

3. Athlon 64's have SSE2 as well; what's your point? The Athlon 64/Opteron's SSE2 implementation is generally pretty decent, and it does EXTREMELY well in packed SSE2, but not as well in scalar mode.

I think most people need to take a double-blind test to find out if they can actually tell the difference between a P4 and an Athlon64 of roughly equivalent ratings.

1. The Pentium 3.0c w/ HyperThreading multitasks better then the Athlon 64 3500+ easily.

2. HyperThreading has very little performance hit in the majority of applications out there. Its benefits greatly outweigh any negative effects.

3. My point is the a strong floating-point unit isn't neccessary for most of todays applications. They are optimized to run on SSE/SSE2/SSE3. Most of the systems out there are Intel based so they are going to try and make the application run the best on Intel CPU's first.

I agree though, there is very little performance difference between a like-speed Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 in most areas. Multitasking is one of the areas though that the Pentium 4 handles more efficiently.

Because they have no life so for the 20 hours that they are up sitting at the computer they have to make sure to use that time effectivily!

Most of you dont work with productivity software or do alot of encodeing large files. If you did then you would realize the benefits of HyperThreading and being able to accomplish things much quicker.

Its the same reason why people buy dual processors to accomplish their work more efficiently. HyperThreading isn't as good as 2 CPU's but its better then a single processor with nothing at all.

 

[Brad4321]

Most of you dont work with productivity software or do alot of encodeing large files. If you did then you would realize the benefits of HyperThreading and being able to accomplish things much quicker.

I am pretty sure that if I was doing something pretty CPU intensive like encoding, I would get a faster athlon than a slower pentium anyday, as per your example. There is no point in having smooth switching between cpu intensive apps if it takes the apps hours longer to finish. Unless, of course, you are wanting to do many cpu intensive things at once, in which no single processor system is going to cut it.

 

[burningrave101]

I am pretty sure that if I was doing something pretty CPU intensive like encoding, I would get a faster athlon than a slower pentium anyday, as per your example. There is no point in having smooth switching between cpu intensive apps if it takes the apps hours longer to finish. Unless, of course, you are wanting to do many cpu intensive things at once, in which no single processor system is going to cut it.

I never said a 3.0c would be faster then an Athlon 64 3500+. I said it would multitask better.

And the difference between a 3.0c and an A64 3500+ would be a matter of seconds or minutes at the very most, not hours.

For a machine that will be used for heavy CPU tasks a 3.4E would be a better buy then the A64 3500+.

If your are able to hit up around 3.8Ghz+ on a Prescott then it would be faster then an FX-55 in alot of applications, especially encodeing and productivity software. And it would be a better multitasking machine.

 

[Josh_B]

The newer revisions for Prescott are achieving better temps and they perform just fine. They have 1MB L2 cache, SSE3, and they overclock very well. People are able to hit 4Ghz on just aircooling.



1. The Pentium 3.0c w/ HyperThreading multitasks better then the Athlon 64 3500+ easily.

2. HyperThreading has very little performance hit in the majority of applications out there. Its benefits greatly outweigh any negative effects.

3. My point is the a strong floating-point unit isn't neccessary for most of todays applications. They are optimized to run on SSE/SSE2/SSE3. Most of the systems out there are Intel based so they are going to try and make the application run the best on Intel CPU's first.

I agree though, there is very little performance difference between a like-speed Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 in most areas. Multitasking is one of the areas though that the Pentium 4 handles more efficiently.



Most of you dont work with productivity software or do alot of encodeing large files. If you did then you would realize the benefits of HyperThreading and being able to accomplish things much quicker.

Its the same reason why people buy dual processors to accomplish their work more efficiently. HyperThreading isn't as good as 2 CPU's but its better then a single processor with nothing at all.

1. Again, please provide proof that context switching is faster on a P4 over an Athlon 64. I use both, and I can't tell the difference. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm interested to see if anyone has actually proven the P4 is factually better at mulitasking. Clock for clock, context switching on a P4 is slower than a PII.

2. I agree. I wish AMD would implement SMT on the Athlon 64. It is likely though, that the Athlon 64 won't benefit nearly as much as the P4 from SMT. Sun has some CPUs coming out that have crazy SMT implementations...

3.I have to partly disagree with you in regards to the SSE/SSE2/SSE3 question. Most software was never, and never will be optimized for HT/SSE(x). Cost benefit analysis of the time spent in hand-optimizing usually tends to lean towards few, if any, optimizations. It's been my experience that most developers feel it is the compiler's job to vectorize their code. Unfortunately, most compilers suck at autovectorization. (Codeplay and Intel's compilers are two notable exceptions.) Besides, leaving the code in standard ANSI C or C++ means that they can fairly easily port their code to another platform. If someone was to crazily optimize for the P4, have fun moving that code to a non-PC platform.

 

[burningrave101]

1. Again, please provide proof that context switching is faster on a P4 over an Athlon 64. I use both, and I can't tell the difference. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm interested to see if anyone has actually proven the P4 is factually better at mulitasking. Clock for clock, context switching on a P4 is slower than a PII.

Well i have had both as well and multitasking is better on the Pentium 4. If you dont notice it its because the tasks you are doing dont put enough load on the CPU.

Even Kyle admits to this and he's definitely an AMD !!!!!! .

3.I have to partly disagree with you in regards to the SSE/SSE2/SSE3 question. Most software was never, and never will be optimized for HT/SSE(x). Cost benefit analysis of the time spent in hand-optimizing usually tends to lean towards few, if any, optimizations. It's been my experience that most developers feel it is the compiler's job to vectorize their code. Unfortunately, most compilers suck at autovectorization. (Codeplay and Intel's compilers are two notable exceptions.) Besides, leaving the code in standard ANSI C or C++ means that they can fairly easily port their code to another platform. If someone was to crazily optimize for the P4, have fun moving that code to a non-PC platform.

Alot of popular software is still optimized for SSE/SSE2/SSE3 and the number is growing every day.

SSE2 – Integer Instructions
We jump from the “oldie” MMX straight to the newcomer SSE2. It makes sense, as SSE2 consists of two quite different parts: SSE development and MMX development. The former deals with real numbers, the latter – with integers. Compared to MMX, SSE2 registers are twice as big, i.e. there are not 8 numbers stored there but 16. It means twice the application performance after SSE2 optimization, because the instructions processing speed remained unchanged. By the way, a program already optimized for MMX can easily be further optimized for SSE2 due to similarities in their instruction sets.

Athlon XP processors don’t support SSE2. And we could witness a curious picture when Pentium 4 was at first losing to Athlon XP in speed, but after the application was optimized for SSE2, it would run faster on Pentium 4.

We should acknowledge that the idea to develop MMX into SSE2 was most felicitous. There are few programs that are optimized for MMX, but those that are, are optimized very thoroughly. We also should mention that Intel offered the software developers a number of SSE2-optimized libraries with some typical encoding functions almost for free, which played a crucial part in “saving” the Pentium 4 performance.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/prescott-sse_3.html

 

[rolo]

1. Again, please provide proof that context switching is faster on a P4 over an Athlon 64. I use both, and I can't tell the difference. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm interested to see if anyone has actually proven the P4 is factually better at mulitasking. Clock for clock, context switching on a P4 is slower than a PII.

I will provide an explanation of why context switching is "faster" on a P4 than on an Athlon 64. It's not so much that it's faster (it's not), it's that we have two virtual processors that can do stuff for us, and thus things happen sooner. The key here is response time, not performance throughput.

Multitasking on a single processor system is simulated in that things are not actually happening simultaneously. The system switches between tasks every 20ms or so to provide this illusion. Most tasks in the system are idle most of the time, and relinquish their 20ms almost every chance they get. Other tasks may do some processing and then yield some or most of their timeslice. A "CPU heavy" task will use all of its 20ms timeslice and only yield when forced to (when it is pre-empted). Note that 20ms is just illustrative and the number may be 3, 9, 13, 16.9832, etc. Doesn't matter.

Let's provide a situation for some context though. Let's say that in the background you have WinRAR gobbling up some huge quantity of files (gigabytes worth!) and you still want to go about normal "light" activity: web browsing, instant messaging, e-mail, etc. So what is happening is that WinRAR is using up all of its timeslice every chance it gets in order to do the compression task you asked it to do. The only time it explicitely yields is when it goes to the disk for a read or write (further explanation on the mechanics of this type of yield is beyond the scope of this post ).

The "light" tasks that you want to perform generally do not use up all of their timeslice and end up yielding a lot of time to WinRAR. However, before they can even respond to your input (clicking, typing), they must wait for WinRAR to finish or yield its current timeslice. So things may get "chunky" because every little minute thing you want to do is delayed by up to 20ms while WinRAR does its thing.

Enter HyperThreading. Now we have a virtual 2nd CPU that can perform tasks. While WinRAR is gobbling up timeslices and CPU time, you want to do something: click on a URL, resize a window, type stuff, whatever. Now, with HyperThreading the task can respond before WinRAR is done with its timeslice by utilizing the 2nd available virtual processor. Both tasks will be executing at about 50% of the available performance, but the key here is that the thing you are interacting with in the foreground is responding sooner. Every little minute thing you do does not have to take a backseat to WinRAR, although it does have to share the available performance with it.

With a dual processor / dual core system, you get the same thing except that both tasks may continue to use the full performance potential of whatever chip they are running on. In other words, the whole HyperThreading debate will be completely moot and pointless once AMD introduces their dual core processors.

I have 3 systems currently: Dual 3GHz Xeon, Single P4 3.0E, and an Athlon 64 2800+. The performance for a single threaded app is, in general, equal amongst all three. Apparently games should be faster on the A64 but I haven't tried any on it. For multitasking, the Xeon annihilates the other two (duh). For a situation involving a very CPU heavy app in the background while still trying to do general stuff in the foreground (navigating Explorer, browsing web pages), the P4 beats the Athlon in terms of how usable the system is. The Athlon wins huge points in terms of ergonomics: it's super quiet, puts out hardly any heat, and it just feels like a higher quality system.

Anyway, does any of this help?

 

[Tazman2]

Amd 64 has sse/sse2 and the new revisions coming next year will have sse3 as well AND the dual cores once they come they will be 2 REAL cpus on 1 chip instead of 1 cpu having a tiny bit of a 2nd cpu! So thus this huge performance we have now on regular tasks will be in multitasking as well so again byebye intel! vroooooooommmmmmm And no pulling "intel will have dual core too" yes dual core of what it has now which is loosing in pretty much everything and not to mention those new sse3 revisions amongst other things on that new single core will go to the duals as well i assume so! =D

 

[Barnaby]

Rolo I think has the best explanation on this yet..

Look, I've been running AMD for my last 3 main boxes.. but this is because I'm a gamer, and generally don't do heavy multitasking..

I'll be making the switch to an A64 this xmas, and I know it will be the best system I could have for my uses.. But it does not entirely annihilate the P4 in everything out there.. Video encoding, and multitasking still belong to the P4. Be it through hyperthreading, and SSE2/3 optimizations, they still win alot of the benches. The faster A64's have closed the gap, but you simply cannot say that an AMD64 will beat the P4 in apps like Lightwave, or most instances of 3DSMAX.

P4's can handle 2 threads at a time, while the A64 can only handle 1. there is no arguing that a processor that can handle 2 threads won't be better at multitasking than a single threaded processor..

Does this mean the single threaded cpu won't finish it's tasks faster? not at all.. But it will be choppier due to the example that Rolo gave above.. The single threaded CPU has to give everything a turn to get it's cycles.. The 2 threaded one does not. It can address other apps at the same time.

Now, in reality, the P4 is not a true multi-threaded processor.. It's just that the P4 has such an insane amount of unused resources when it works, due to it's pipeline and rest of it's architecture, it can run another thread through it's parts that are not being currently used.. this helps the P4 be more efficient, since it's generally wasting cycles due to it's extremely large pipeline.. The a64 on the other hand, generally doesn't waste it's cycles, and wouldn't benefit from a SMT feature.

If you are the type of person that will be doing mostly video editing, 3d rendering, etc, the P4 is your platform. The P4 is better for the most part at media type apps.. the a64 is better at scientific apps, like games, number crunching, specview, etc..

You really can't go wrong with either platform, as it's not like the P4 is slow in anyway.. But each platform has it's own strengths and weaknesses.. This whole thread is bullshit, since it's come down to a bunch of over zealous amder's trying to say the P4 isn't any better at multiasking, when it really is.. And I am an amd'er and I say this..

Don't argure the facts, you're just discrediting yourself. Every hardware site out there has shown or voiced their opinion on what the P4 is good at and what the A64 is good at.. And you're going against what every site is saying at this point..

things will change when we get dual core's, but it's still not going to be all roses.. Dual core won't be for everyone at first, since dual core's WILL be running slower than what the single cores cpu's are at today.. You'll be better off with the single core, if you are an average user that doesn't do heavy multitasking..

If you do, amd will have you covered better.. but you'd still be better off with dual cpu's if you really do alot of multi-threaded apps and multitasking..

 

[stavroguine]

I have 3 systems currently: Dual 3GHz Xeon, Single P4 3.0E, and an Athlon 64 2800+. The performance for a single threaded app is, in general, equal amongst all three. Apparently games should be faster on the A64 but I haven't tried any on it. For multitasking, the Xeon annihilates the other two (duh). For a situation involving a very CPU heavy app in the background while still trying to do general stuff in the foreground (navigating Explorer, browsing web pages), the P4 beats the Athlon in terms of how usable the system is. The Athlon wins huge points in terms of ergonomics: it's super quiet, puts out hardly any heat, and it just feels like a higher quality system.

Anyway, does any of this help?

You were working in windows, I suppose.
It would be interesting to see how these compare with recent linux kernels where they made effort to make the scheduler more "responsive" for interactive tasks.

 

[Posty]

I like Tazman2's anology about the honda civic .
Intel is to Amd as Ricers are to Muscle
Intel has HT.... This is like hondas VTECH in a way
Sure it helps somewhat but really now that lil 1.6l with its vtech costs more , makes less power and barley has torque. Now you take a musle car with something along the lines of a 5.7l LS1 or a 5.0 302 and you got a completly different concept cheaper to build and tweak , faster and more torque (torque compared as fpu power in cpus).

@burningrave101 , i'm not sure i understand your point in standing up for ht, i mean really now i have used both types of cpu plenty of times as i work on pcs alot and theres no slow down or stuttering when multitasking with an amd. Only difference i can tell is that the p4 does things slower,especially when multitasking underload.

 

[rolo]

You were working in windows, I suppose.
It would be interesting to see how these compare with recent linux kernels where they made effort to make the scheduler more "responsive" for interactive tasks.

I imagine that forcing an immediate pre-emption in favor of whatever application the user wants to interact with would have noticable gains. However, implementing the logic to determine this quickly ( < 1 ms) and accurately could be tricky and might add some overhead. Still, it would be a worthy thing to check out!

 

[NEVERLIFT]

I am pretty sure that if I was doing something pretty CPU intensive like encoding, I would get a faster athlon than a slower pentium anyday, as per your example. There is no point in having smooth switching between cpu intensive apps if it takes the apps hours longer to finish. Unless, of course, you are wanting to do many cpu intensive things at once, in which no single processor system is going to cut it.

I agree Brad, every P4 I have used has been slower then my Athlon64 2.2ghz. The only time I see a P4 tying or beating me is when its running 3.7ghz or faster and using a 250mhz fsb.
I just dont get how HT in Burningrave101's mind makes the P4 so much faster? The P4 is slower than the Athlon64 and when multi-tasking it gets even slower! Who the fuck cares if there is a few seconds delay when the Athlon64 is so much faster, cooler and cheaper.

Burningrave101 you sure do preach about HT enough, I wonder why you sold your P4 and even got a Athlon64.

 

[NEVERLIFT]

I'm sure alot people here use Google... so if you dont mind would you google hyper threading and problems.

I seem to find alot info about software not working with HT enabled or stuff going slower.
Seems alot videocapture and encoding software has problems when HT is enabled, I assume a patch or an updated version of the software wil fix this.

There are pleanty reviews where the P4 vs P3 vs AMD clock for clock and it seems a P3 Tualatin running 1.3ghz can beat a 2ghz P4, and clock for clock the AMD stomps the shit out of a P4.

 

[rolo]

I agree Brad, every P4 I have used has been slower then my Athlon64 2.2ghz. The only time I see a P4 tying or beating me is when its running 3.7ghz or faster and using a 250mhz fsb.

This is most likely true!

I just dont get how HT in Burningrave101's mind makes the P4 so much faster? The P4 is slower than the Athlon64 and when multi-tasking it gets even slower! Who the fuck cares if there is a few seconds delay when the Athlon64 is so much faster, cooler and cheaper.

It is exactly that "few seconds" that people are so ecstatic about. In Burningrave's defense, the fluidity gained by HyperThreading is very noticeable and pretty sweet. In your defense, the word "faster" in his description of the P4's performance is something of a misnomer. It's not actually faster, it's just responding to him sooner. If you are only comparing how fast your CPU-heavy background tasks are, then the Athlon will win.

Burningrave101 you sure do preach about HT enough, I wonder why you sold your P4 and even got a Athlon64.

For me personally, I'm looking at getting an FX-55 and ditching the Xeons ... I don't need this multitasking titan at home anymore so I'd prefer to have a gaming titan. I graduated college and have a nice job so most of my heavy multitasking is done at work on a very capable dual proc system.

 

[burningrave101]

Amd 64 has sse/sse2 and the new revisions coming next year will have sse3 as well AND the dual cores once they come they will be 2 REAL cpus on 1 chip instead of 1 cpu having a tiny bit of a 2nd cpu! So thus this huge performance we have now on regular tasks will be in multitasking as well so again byebye intel! vroooooooommmmmmm And no pulling "intel will have dual core too" yes dual core of what it has now which is loosing in pretty much everything and not to mention those new sse3 revisions amongst other things on that new single core will go to the duals as well i assume so! =D

I doubt you have ever seen benchmarks of Intel's mobile Pentium M chips vs AMD's mobile chips in laptops lol. Intel owns AMD in the mobile technology world. The new dual cores are based on these Pentium M chips. There is also a chance Intel would include HyperThreading on both cores which would give you effectively the performance of 2 cores and 2 logical cores at the same time. This would give incredible multitasking performance and AMD would have no chance at all in something that was programed to handle multiple threads at once. I also look for Intel to switch to an integrated memory controller before much longer because the northbridge controller causes alot of latency and this is where the A64 gets its advantage in gaming because games rely on latency instead of high bandwidth.

I agree Brad, every P4 I have used has been slower then my Athlon64 2.2ghz. The only time I see a P4 tying or beating me is when its running 3.7ghz or faster and using a 250mhz fsb.
I just dont get how HT in Burningrave101's mind makes the P4 so much faster? The P4 is slower than the Athlon64 and when multi-tasking it gets even slower! Who the fuck cares if there is a few seconds delay when the Athlon64 is so much faster, cooler and cheaper.

Burningrave101 you sure do preach about HT enough, I wonder why you sold your P4 and even got a Athlon64.

Your a joke NEVERLIFT lol. Even the benchmarks you tried to provide here a few weeks ago in a thread were trounced by Pentium 4 owners lol. Give it a rest for christ sake.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=837943

I sold my Pentium 4 because i wanted the Athlon 64 for the gaming performance in the CPU intensive games i play like Morrowind. You see, i'm smart enough to realize i'm going to have to have a specific CPU for certain tasks if i want the best performance in that area. If i was planning to run heavy CPU applications and multitask then i would be going with an LGA 775 Pentium 4 w/ HyperThreading no question.

I'm sure alot people here use Google... so if you dont mind would you google hyper threading and problems.

I seem to find alot info about software not working with HT enabled or stuff going slower.
Seems alot videocapture and encoding software has problems when HT is enabled, I assume a patch or an updated version of the software wil fix this.

There are pleanty reviews where the P4 vs P3 vs AMD clock for clock and it seems a P3 Tualatin running 1.3ghz can beat a 2ghz P4, and clock for clock the AMD stomps the shit out of a P4.

A 2Ghz Pentium 4 doesn't even have HyperThreading.

The reason why the lower clocked Pentium 4's were being beaten by the P3 and AMD chips was because Intel had just stepped the pipeline stages up to 20 which means the clock speeds also have to increase alot ot keep the stages full. If the stages aren't full then you are running idle and it takes alot longer to empty the stages when there is a branch misprediction. People seem to of forgotten this when Prescott released. Prescott had an increased pipeline stage once again. If Prescott's heat issues were addressed somehow and Intel was able to push the Prescott cores on up above 4Ghz then it would be able to take advantage of those increased pipelines. Why do you think clock for clock the 3.0E is slower then a 3.0C? Its because the 3.0E has deeper stages and there is more latency.

And yes an AMD chip is faster clock for clock. But it is also unable to reach higher frequencies because of that fact. It has fewer pipeline stages so its clock speeds dont have alot of headroom to keep scaling higher.

Its pointless to brag about one being faster clock for clock when even though thats true it can never reach the clock speeds of the other processor with deeper pipelines and as long as the one with deeper pipelines continues to scale higher its going to be the faster processor as was seen with the Pentium 4 against the Athlon XP after the P4 broke the 3Ghz barrier. Prescott however has reached its limits because of the severe transistor leakage from the 90nm stepdown.

The Pentium 4 "c" series tore up the Athlon XP's last year and if it hadn't been for the Athlon 64 cores AMD would of really had to work really hard just to keep their head above water. They weren't even breaking even last year because they had to keep prices so low to compete with Intel that they were hardly making a profit at all.

 

[Jonsey]

Interesting discussion here. I have both a 2.2 GHz AMD 64 (s754) and a 3.0c. I recently upgraded that to a 3.4E because I got it so cheap. I have both, so I don't think I could be accused of bias. The AMD 64 is a very fast processor. It is certainly faster in gaming. But I use the P4 for my primary rig. Why? Because I do lots of things at once, and the P4 is simply better. I get netflix once a week. I usually try to encode them and get them back in the mail the same day or the next day. The P4 is clearly faster in DVD shrink. In fact, certain portions of the DVD shrink program have been optimized for HT machines.

I can game while I encode just fine on the P4 machine. Why do I do that? Becuase I have a busy life. I only have a couple of hours at night to do all the things I want to do. So I have to multitask, and so does my computer. The AMD64 can do it if I turn the thread priority way down, but then it doesn't actually get anything done on the encode job.

To those who say that the AMD64 is a better multitasker than the AMD XP, what is the difference between the two chips? The AMD64 is faster, due mostly to it's integrated memory controller. Any other differences? As I see it, the AMD 64 feels just like a really fast AMD XP.

 

[NEVERLIFT]

Well maybe Anandtech or HardOCP hell any review site!!! will start doing some testing and benchmarks with multi-tasking to show which is better at it.

Bottom line is the P4 is slower and it gets slower when it multi-tasks. Now if the software being used it multi-threaded and made for the P4 then I guess it wont be that much slower.


I would love to see some reviews done from a respected and trusted review site that take multi-tasking into account.

 

[Josh_B]

You were working in windows, I suppose.
It would be interesting to see how these compare with recent linux kernels where they made effort to make the scheduler more "responsive" for interactive tasks.

Thank you for the explanation Rolo. I am in your debt.

I think that perhaps my ambivalence towards Athlon or P4 multitasking performance has more to do with exactly what is posted above, moreso than the P4's low-level threading abilities.

Interesting...

 

[SUPERFLOP]

I havent had an Intel system for a while, i currently use an Overclocked Barton @ 11x209.. i can play any singleplayer game i want and run any other program i have at the same time.. except one.... if Diskkeeper comes on i will notice some lag.. even on multi player games if im not hogging up my upload i can listen to WMP play Americas Army.. which is can be as taxing on the system as Farcry and Doom. i can download at the same time as well, as long as i have sufficient upload for the games.. when im playing with movies or anything such as unzipping three separate 700+ Mb files at the same time then things get slow but i do it so rarely it doesnt matter, either way i can still surf the net reasonably well while doing that but believe me its not the picture of smoothness.


Really its only at that level of computing where i think the advantadges of HT will shine.. if you are planning on simply playing a game and then do some other things between rounds or waht have you, the choice is the AMD64.. it beats the Intel in gaming and pretty badly and for the average user i dont see them doing enough multithreaded computing to actually show the benefit... i wouldnt hesitate to purchase an AMD for anyhting other than a high productivity work enviroment.

 

[burningrave101]

Well maybe Anandtech or HardOCP hell any review site!!! will start doing some testing and benchmarks with multi-tasking to show which is better at it.

Bottom line is the P4 is slower and it gets slower when it multi-tasks. Now if the software being used it multi-threaded and made for the P4 then I guess it wont be that much slower.


I would love to see some reviews done from a respected and trusted review site that take multi-tasking into account.

I would love to see you provide a single review anywhere that shows the Athlon 64 multitasks better then the Pentium 4 lol. You may THINK you have already done so but you haven't.

Bottom line is the A64 is the choice for gamers and the P4 is the choice for heavy multitasking and CPU intensive applications.

Really its only at that level of computing where i think the advantadges of HT will shine.. if you are planning on simply playing a game and then do some other things between rounds or waht have you, the choice is the AMD64.. it beats the Intel in gaming and pretty badly and for the average user i dont see them doing enough multithreaded computing to actually show the benefit... i wouldnt hesitate to purchase an AMD for anyhting other than a high productivity work enviroment.

I'm not really sure where people have gotten the idea that the Athlon 64 beats the Pentium 4 pretty badly in gaming but thats just simply not the case unless your playing a CPU intensive game like Morrowind and HL2. The majority of games are GPU intensive and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two processors.

Has anyone viewed HardOCP's CPU scaling guide? The Pentium 4 3.0c was as fast as the Athlon 64 3500+ in the games they benched. The reason for that is your not going to be CPU limited in a GPU intensive game, which most games are, with ither processor unless your playing at a low resolution like 800x600 which noone in their right mind plays at with todays high-end video cards.

The Athlon 64 is still a better gaming processor, it just doesn't kill the Pentium 4 unless your talking truly CPU itensive games where the on-die memory controller can really take effect.

 

[Brad4321]

And the difference between a 3.0c and an A64 3500+ would be a matter of seconds or minutes at the very most, not hours.

You obviously don't do much serious processing work. When you encode/render/whatever something that days to complete, you can have hours of difference.

 

[burningrave101]

You obviously don't do much serious processing work. When you encode/render/whatever something that days to complete, you can have hours of difference.

And exactly what would you be doing that takes days to complete?

Extensive work of that nature would be done on multiple processors, not a single processor like an Athlon 64.

I guess if you did it long enough you could have a difference of years between the two processor lol.