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Re: [PLUG] AMD or Intel P4??
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Well, if anyone wants to really know for sure, I have quite a variety of
machines here which anyone is welcome to drop by and hack on. Featured
prominently are my P4 1.8A@2.73 and my (though now the wife's Athlon XP
1700+@ 1.6GHz (not real fond of model numbers myself, though you really have
to admit, it's the easiest solution to the P4/Athlon performance-per-clock
disparity).
If you'd rather just have my opinion, I would in now way buy a Pentium 4,
unless you are willing to recompile everything yourself. Due to some
'advances' in the design, the Pentium 4 performs *very* poorly at old code,
with the problem getting worse the older the code is.... Since most distros
are compiled for 486s, things get very ugly, very quickly. Compiling for 586
(ala Mandrake) isa very minor improvement, and compiling for 686 only gets
the P4 into the same ballpark as a similar Athlon running the original
486-level binaries.
My experience:
X startup on P4 2.73 with DDR: 23 seconds
X startup on Athlon 1.6 with SDR: 8 seconds
kernel compile on P4 2.73 with DDR: 3 minutes, 46 seconds
kernel compile on Athlon 1.6 with SDR: 2 minutes, 55 seconds
As you can see, the performance difference is rather shocking. I'd imaging
most of this comes from the P4's weak x86/x87 design, as it relies heavily
on SSE/SSE2 execution units instead. If that's true, the P4's performance
should rebound nicely.... Once everything is recompiled for SSE2 support....
Things only get uglier if you consider costs:
P4 2.4GHz = 389$
Athlon XP 2100+ = 178$
These CPUs are very close, in terms of performance. If you were thinking
more budget minded:
P4 1.8A = 165$
Athlon XP 1800+ = 91$
Again, if anyone wants a hands on head-to-head, I have representatives of
both types of PC available. Tossing on your distro of choice wouldn't be any
trouble.
- Rich 'Forge' Mingin
forge:at:dca.net
www.tech-report.com
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