AMD says it's based on a series of benchmarks relative to the original
Athlon; not 'compared to a P4'.
One can always come up with an 'explanation' for the invented 'nomenclature'.
And one can always find the facts. Copied form the pdf. I'll let whoever
wants to read it sort it out, but note the reference to the P4.
Page 2 AMD Athlon" XP Processor June 4, 2002 Benchmarking and Model
Numbering Methodology Performance and Frequency With the advent of the AMD
Athlon" processor and the Intel Pentium® 4 processor, the design
architectures of these two companies fundamentally diverged. This design
divergence has resulted in a difference in work done per clock cycle.
Thus, microprocessors operating at identical frequencies may offer
dramatically different levels of performance. Consequently, frequency is
no longer the most meaningful metric for judging relative microprocessor
performance. Today s end users need a better approach W H I T E P A P E R
for comparing relative processor performance. This new approach must
recognize that end users: " Care about the performance of the applications
that they use and care less about the results of synthetic tests "
Typically use a variety of application software " Care about the
performance of the system that they purchase " Need the ability to easily
and simply conduct comparative shopping AMD is driving the True
Performance Initiative (TPI) a strategic initiative with industry leaders
and consumer advocates to develop a reliable processor performance metric
that PC users can trust.
And then there's the tables that compare it to the P4 and even a list of
the P4 hardware used in the comparative systems. The only conclusing on
can come to is that the PR is for comparison to the P4.
Better throw this in too.
Competitive Comparison It is also important to consider how AMD Athlon XP
processors perform relative to competitive PC processors. In order to
provide an accurate comparison between systems based on the AMD Athlon XP
processor and on the Pentium 4 processor, systems are configured
similarly. The details of the system configurations utilized in this
analysis are listed in Appendix D. For the purposes of this comparison,
AMD has used DDR memory system configurations for both the AMD and Intel
processor-based systems. DDR was chosen because it has been adopted as the
mainstream memory system configuration whereas RDRAM has been relegated to
high-end systems and is expected to account for less than 10 percent of
the market, according to industry analysts. Appendix C includes a
comparison using the RDRAM memory system configuration for the Pentium 4.
