In most benchmarks, the P3 1GHz beats out the P4 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz. Athlon classic and Thunderbird wipe the floor with the P4.
In some cases, the P3 1GHz even beats out the P4 when overclocked to 1.6GHz.
The problem is that the P4 has a 20 stage pipeline, and the P3 has a 10 stage pipeline. This is great for the P4 when branch prediction goes flawlessly. That's the problem. It doesn't...especially in integer operations. Guess what happens when you have a branch prediction miss? You gotta dump everything you did and restart the pipeline from the very beginning. That's a BAD BAD BAD penalty for the P4...but not so bad with the P3.
That is just one reason the Athlon and P3 are wiping the floor with the P4...right now. The other reason? RDRAM blows.
I'm desperately trying to keep my brother away from the P4 as he told me he was interested in it.
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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
Oh, I most certainly did. I didn't send him Tom's Hardware's version, but Anandtech's and Sharky's oughta do, though. I did get an e-mail from him asking me what he thought about an Athlon based machine.
So I did my duty in style.
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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
from what i've been reading.. there's a huge leap in performance from the P4 as you move up in mhz.. the earlier models won't perform as well.. but the higher number ones will be a huge leap from the lower mhz ones..
That's because the later models will be DDR RAM based systems. Rambus RDRAM has been lackluster, and the fact that SDR RAM can still compete with it (only need to run 1/4 the speed at 64 bits to pump the same bandwidth at 16 bits) has just crippled the P4 at start. Also, that 8kb L1 data cache, though low in latency, is gonna have a high miss rate. I'd rather have a much bigger cache with a higher latency than a tiny cache like that. The 20 stage pipeline is gonna always hurt the integer performance of this chip, but that's not gonna matter, that much to us gamers.
The P4 will no doubt be a great processor once you couple it with good peripherals and give it a bit of a boast in speed. You have to remember when the P5/60, the 486/20, and the PII/266 all came out. You could get as good of performance or even better, at times with a 486/66-100, a 386/33-40, and a P5-MMX/233, respectively, with outstanding peripherals and a bit of overclocking.
This time, however, Intel is behind the curve. AMD was the first to release a 7th gen processor, and the reviews show that the Athlon will still compete, clock for clock, with the P4....not to mention when AMD's next processor comes out....is that next year?
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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?
<font color="#000000">[Edited by JHowse on November 21, 2000 (edited 1 time)]</font>
Summarizing, a reader noticed that their MPEG4 benchmark is skewed towards MMX processors. The benchmark is designed to test FPU, but MMX is an integer calculation. Tom changed the way the MPEG4 is ripped and compressed, and the results are drastically different.
The Athlon beats the P4 by over 5 hours in MPEG4 ripping at high quality!
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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
