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Advice/Suggestion/Info CPU comparison Athlon64 v P4
Hi all,
I've been approved for funding to start a web design and hosting business. It's a good thing I have gotten assistance as the costs of startup are higher and the growth of opportunities, i.e. income, is slow in coming. Anyway, part of what was approved, and I am lucky in this matter was a computer upgrade of the MB and CPU. Having been using an Athlon XP 1700+, I've had to put on hold some opportunities that my system could not keep handle, that is unless I shutdown everything else besides one app and then let it go on its own. But that is the issue of concern in my choice. I had been thinking that the Athlon64 was the best choice, with the better performance on 32 bit apps then Intel's 64 bit CPUs. It's been a little while since I did the Computer Engineering type work and designing systems but my training was enough to suggest that a Athlon64 versus a Pentium 4 at the same speed or comparable speeds would show the Athlon64 to be a greater performer. Then it was pointed out by a computer dealer who I use often that since I do multitask that the hyper-threading would be best for me. In fact I do, as a web designer multitask, in so far as I'd have perhaps, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop open at once and other applications in the background such as an apache server, mysql and php. That I use mainly to test applications before uploading them. Anyway, I had thought that I had read that the Athlon XP and Athlon64 both offered multithreading. In fact it is multitransport on the Athlon64 versus the 32 bit Athlons, such as Athlon XP CPUs. So, I did some research trying to figure out which would best meet my needs or offer the best performance in relation to my typical use of the system. Some reports say that the P4 with Hyperthreading beats the Athlon64 with hypter-transport ( I recognize these are different concepts). So, I could use some advice, or web links to make informed decisions, to make comparisions... My research so far has left me vacilating between the best choice being the P4 and the Athlon64. One factor is the relatively or seemingly small different in multitasking performance that the P4 might have in any reports I have read, or reviews. For Streaming media, video editing, audio/video/multimedia or other I/O issues the Athlon64 at comparable speeds does win out. The Athlon64 3200 (should there be a + there as in the Athlon XP?) and the P4 3.06GHz. I beleive the onboard memory controller does have an impact on the I/O because I/O will be going into memory and the access to memory for the Athlon64 is faster with the onboard memory controller. Any advice, feedback, refrences to pursue, i.e. web sites, would be greatly appreciated, along with of course some explanations to clarify my thinking and understanding, Thanks, Bruce ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++ Bruce Whealton Triangle Web Hosting and Web Design http://TriangleWebHosting.biz or http://TriangleWebHosting.net ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++ |
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First to clear up a bunch of misconceptions. Hyperthreading and
Hypertransport are two completely different thing. Hyperthreading is running multiple instruction streams through a single processor at the same time. The P4 does this, the Opteron does not. Hypertransport is a very fast bus that's designed to multiprocessors to work together effeciently. This is used by all AMD 64 processors, however the hypertransport buses on the Opteron 2xx series are set up to allow two Opterons to work together. The Opteron 8xx series can hook up to 8 processors together. Multiprocessing is multiple real processors. A dual Opteron or a dual Xeon system is and example. -------------- Hyperthreading on the P4 doesn't work very well, it boosts throughput by a small amount (about 10%) but cuts individual thread performance by about 25% (at least it did when I measured it on a dual Xeon system). The Opterons are much more effecient multiprocessors than the Xeons. There are several reasons for this. 1) Each Opteron has it's own memory controller. In a dual processor system that means that the total memory bandwidth available is twice the bandwidth in a dual Xeon system because the Xeons share a single memory controller. 2) IO doesn't compete for bus bandwidth in a Opteron system because the memory is on a dedicated bus. On the Intel processors everything shares the same frontside bus so memory accesses compete with IO accesses. 3) The hypertransport buses provide a scalable multiprocessor interconnect, as you add more processors the gain is larger. The AMD64 CPUs have a much more effecient microarchitecture. The big advantages are, 1) Much shorter pipelines, about half the length of the Intel processors. Long pipelines allow for higher clock rates (which is why Intel did it) but they suffer anytime a branch is mispredicted because more work must be thrown away. Intel added hyperthreading as a way to get back some of the performance that they lost by making their pipes to deep. 2) On board memory controllers, these cut down memory access times significantly. The only place where the P4 processors are competitive is in games and other multimedia applications. For server style computing you'll find that an Opteron system will be much faster. |
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