| sean finney on 9 Mar 2004 15:11:02 -0000 |
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hey, On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 03:28:15PM +0530, McLinux wrote: > I am planning to upgrade my humble P-III 450 Mhz with P-IV, however I am > very much willing to experiment and I have heard that AMD Athlon is > doing really great. Due to this I am confused and am seeking advice as > which Motherboard, CPU and RAM I should opt for. i think the amd cpus have pretty much consistently beat out the intel ones in both price and general performance. from what i remember, the reason amd usually outperforms intel is that in their latest chips, intel is relying on a heavily pipelined architecture, which queues something like 20-30 instructions. if the cpu mis-predicts which way a branch is going to go, it has to flush the entire pipe and start over from scratch. typically, this will happen a lot in interactive environments and other programs with heavy use of if/else/switch type statements. however, one place where this performance hit won't occur will be in multimedia processing, which has far fewer conditional breaks and is more just raw number crunching. in fact this is where a pipelined architecture can come in really handy. personally, i think i'd still recommend amd in spite of this, just because they've never done me wrong and it's so much cheaper than intel, though honestly, you might not even notice a difference on the desktop between the lastest each has to offer. however, if you do go for amd, the one thing i'd recommend against is getting a VIA based motherboard. those things really suck, and are what you'll commonly find coming along with amd chips. in my experience, it's always been those boards that have been the i/o bottleneck on my systems. hth sean Attachment:
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