On 7 Nov 2004 19:26:36 -0800,
(E-Mail Removed) (Ryan) wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>Sorry of this is a stupid question. I did a little research before
>buying, but maybe not enough.
>
>I walked into my local Best Buy ready to purchase a new Gateway PC
>with a Intel® Pentium® 4 processor 530 with Hyper-Threading Technology
>that was 3.0 MHZ.
>
>When I arrived, the machine I had selected online was (of course) out
>of stock and I spotten an HP PC instead that was about $150 less and
>had a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor in it.
>
>I found a salesperson who seemed to know what he was saying and when I
>asked for a simply comparison between the AMD processor and the Intel
>in the machine they were out of, he said:
>
>"The AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor is actually faster than the 3.0 MHZ
>Pentium 4 in the Gateway. Actually, it works out to about 3.1 MHZ for
As others have mentioned, the sales person is kinda-sorta right
(assuming you/he ment "GHz" where you have "MHz" written... a 3.0MHz
processor would be REALLY slow by today's standards! :> ). It's
really quite tough to give a single number to compare the two chips,
since in some situations one might be faster and in others the other
might be faster.
As a general rule though, I would tend to say that the AthlonXP 3200+
and the P4 3.0GHz will be sufficiently close in all applications that
you'll never notice the difference.
>this Athlon and AMD processors are better at Graphics than Intel."
Err, this part is kind of meaningless. The graphics performance is
much more determined by the video card than by the processor. Now, it
may be that he meant the AMD system came with a better video card, so
it would be better at graphics in that regard.
>I have had PC's with both Intel and AMD processors in them and have
>never had trouble with either. In fact, some I had long forgotten
>which they had in them unless I was asked.
>
>SO, I took the salesperson's word as above and decided to save some
>money and get the HP with the AMD Athlon XP 3200+. Maybe I screwed up.
>
>While I am happy with this new machine, the "system" area of Windows
>XP claims the processor speed on this machine is 2.2 MHZ.
It should read 2.2GHz. The AthlonXP processors run at a lower clock
speed than the P4 but get more done for each clock cycle. There's a
HELL of a lot more to processors than just the clock speed that they
are sold at, which is why both AMD and Intel have started moving away
from selling processors based on clock speed alone (you'll notice that
the Intel chip you were looking at was *NOT* sold as a "P4 3.0GHz",
but rather a "P4 530", which just happened to run at 3.0GHz).
Intel's P4 took a sort of clock-speed-above-all-else design approach.
The result is that the chips clock VERY high. There are basically no
other full-fledge microprocessors in the world that run at 3.0GHz+
speeds, so in this sense Intel succeeded. However, the downside to
this was that their per-clock performance is relatively weak, a lot of
instructions take a long time to execute, there are lots of potentials
for the pipeline to stall, small L1 cache, etc. etc.
The end result, as far you or I are concerned, is that it's
performance is no where near as good as one might think by looking at
clock speed alone. AMD's AthlonXP chips running at 2.2GHz manage to
roughly match a 3.0GHz P4, as do Intel's own Pentium-M chips (used in
laptops), while AMD's newer Athlon64 chips manage similar or sometimes
better performance at only 2.0GHz.
Anyway, long story short, you've made a fine purchase (err, at least
as far as the processors is concerned... I have no idea what the rest
of the system is like!). The only chip I might have recommended above
the AthlonXP would be AMD's newer Athlon64 chip, but that may well be
opening a whole other can of worms, not to mention the fact that it's
probably more expensive.
One word of warning though, if you ever need to call tech support for
this PC, you'd probably want to brush up on your comprehension of
Indian accents. As with pretty much all consumer-grade PCs, ALL the
support for this machine will have been outsourced, mostly to India
(HP outsourced a few of their consumer-product techs to Canada as
well, and they might do like Dell and start opening call centers in
the Philippines as well, but for now it's mostly India).
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca
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