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Which CPU to buy?

S

SelRahc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 12, 2004
Messages
389
Im throwing this question to the AMD people as well... I am kinda tied between the 2, AMD and Intel. I am looking at the AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 (socket 939). As for Intel, the P4 EE was the one I was eyeing at the moment, but whichever is the fastest is what I want ^^ (is that the fastest?) What makes the P4ee better than the AMD? (cost is not an issue). I dont really know what the advantage(s) are over for the fastest P4 over the AMD. I see the FSB slower on an AMD. Does this make all the difference?

In the end is this just a personal pref kinda thing?

Sel

PS sorry if this question has been asked over and over and over again (as im sure it has)
 
If you want the tops out there, Athlon FX-53.

Megahertz isn't the end all be all, the AMD chips and Intel chips are very different from each other.

AMD chips - short pipelines. I think the Athlon 64/Opterons/FX series have an 11-stage pipeline. They are also designed for efficiency, and perform for IPC (instructions per clock cycle) than Intel chips. Typically, they now have 512 KB or 1 MB cache. They also have (I think) 128 KB L1 cache.

The Athlon 64 series of chips technically don't have a front side bus speed because they have an integrated memory controller which reduces memory latency. Pentium chips don't have IMCs as of yet.

Intel Pentium 4 chips - long pipelines. The Northwood chips have 20-stage pipelines. The Prescott chips (which newer EEs will be based on, right now the EEs I think are all Northwood) have a long ass 31-stage pipeline. Deep pipelines need a lot of bandwidth to back it up, and as such Intel chips need high FSB speeds. Right now current Intel chips are 800 Mhz FSB. The Northwoods are good with this speed. The Prescotts are not because of their longer pipeline, so their performance is still on par to their counterpart Northwood chips, thanks to 1 MB L2 cache and 16 kB L1 cache. Northwood chips have 512 KB L2 cache and 8 kB L1 cache.

AMD chips are tops for gaming right now. Intel chips still own the encoding crown. In other applications - AMD chips have great floating point performance, so applications relying heavily on FLOPs do better on AMD chips than on Intel P4s (AMDs have a double pumped FPU, Intel chips can only do 1 FLOP in a cycle). In general, AMD and Intel are pretty much on par in other applications, with Intel winning some applications, and AMD others.

So as you can see, performance is not just determined by FSB and MHz. Other factors come into play.

edit: although honestly, I would never buy a processor over $700 for what seems to me to be a slight performance boost over more sanely priced hardware, like a regular Athlon 64.
 
"Fastest" isn't as clear cut as it used to be. Fastest at what? Gaming? Multi-media? PowerPoint? Multitasking?
 
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