Athlon 64 questions

On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 07:31:40 +0000, Mike B wrote:

My new athlon XP system just got fried..

I have some questions. I've heard the Athlon64 3200+ can beat a P4 3.2 EE in
most tests. Is this true, and is there any reason why one would buy the P4
over the A64 other than bias?

Also, i'm a bit confused now.. I see A64 3200+ listed at pricewatch.. some
are listed as 1600mhz, and some listed at 2.2ghz. is the 1600mhz just
describing the fsb? and do they all run at 2.2ghz?

Lastly, i see there are some that have 1mb of cache as apposed to 512 for
around the same price. Is there a catch that i'm missing?

I've been benchmarking my new A64 3400+ laptop against my 2.66GHz Xeon
server. I've been running NCverilog simulations, Xilinx place and
routes and GCC (Mandrake 10.0 on the Xeon, Mandrake 10.0 AMD64 version on
the laptop). Doing NCverilog the Athlon 64 is nearly twice as fast as the
Xeon (1.95 to be exact). Place and routes are 1.77 times as fast on the
A64 and and GCC is 1.4x faster, i.e. the performance range is between a
3.68GHz and a 5.2GHz Xeon. The laptop is using the 754 pin 1M cache
version of the A64, Opterons and 959 pin A64s should be even faster.

If you compared the performance of an Athlon 3400+ desktop to your notebook,
you would see that the desktop would probably be a much faster performer.
Some have suggested replacing the notebook hard drive with a 7200 rpm
one to improve performance significantly.

General Schvantzkoph wrote:

On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 07:31:40 +0000, Mike B wrote:

My new athlon XP system just got fried..

I have some questions. I've heard the Athlon64 3200+ can beat a P4 3.2 EE in
most tests. Is this true, and is there any reason why one would buy the P4
over the A64 other than bias?

Also, i'm a bit confused now.. I see A64 3200+ listed at pricewatch.. some
are listed as 1600mhz, and some listed at 2.2ghz. is the 1600mhz just
describing the fsb? and do they all run at 2.2ghz?

Lastly, i see there are some that have 1mb of cache as apposed to 512 for
around the same price. Is there a catch that i'm missing?

I've been benchmarking my new A64 3400+ laptop against my 2.66GHz Xeon
server. I've been running NCverilog simulations, Xilinx place and
routes and GCC (Mandrake 10.0 on the Xeon, Mandrake 10.0 AMD64 version on
the laptop). Doing NCverilog the Athlon 64 is nearly twice as fast as the
Xeon (1.95 to be exact). Place and routes are 1.77 times as fast on the
A64 and and GCC is 1.4x faster, i.e. the performance range is between a
3.68GHz and a 5.2GHz Xeon. The laptop is using the 754 pin 1M cache
version of the A64, Opterons and 959 pin A64s should be even faster.

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:16:46 -0400, JK wrote:

If you compared the performance of an Athlon 3400+ desktop to your notebook,
you would see that the desktop would probably be a much faster performer.
Some have suggested replacing the notebook hard drive with a 7200 rpm
one to improve performance significantly.

The hardrive speed matters only if you are doing a lot of disk accesses.
As long as you have enough RAM there are hardly any disk accesses after
you've booted the system because everything ends up in a RAM cache (at
least in Linux, don't know what XP does). My A64 laptop has a slow 4400RPM
disk which does effect it's performance when writing very large files but
it still beats my dual Xeon server even on those benchmarks. I ran NCsim
in two ways, with recordvars off and on. When recordvars is on it saves a
huge (multigigabyte) file, when it's off it just writes a small log file.
The ratio between the A64 and the Xeon drops from 1.96/1 to 1.38/1 because
of the disk bottleneck, but that's still equivalent to a 3.68GHz Xeon.

"JK" wrote in message
...
| If you compared the performance of an Athlon 3400+ desktop to your
notebook,
| you would see that the desktop would probably be a much faster performer.
| Some have suggested replacing the notebook hard drive with a 7200 rpm
| one to improve performance significantly.
|

I just replaced my 4200RPM drive in my notebook with a 7200ROM one
yesterday. HIGHLY advisable to anyone with a 4200RPM Hard drive.