Newbie question about Athlons

Hi all AMD users!

All AMD chips are labelled as NNNN+ where NNNN is a four digit number.

Say if it's labelled as 2800+ does that mean it's a Pentium 4 equivalent of
a 2.8GHz chip? Surely, the 2800+ one doesn't even come near to 2.8GHz if you
look at the frequency which is at about 2GHz.

Also what does the "+" mean after the 2800? Does it mean 2800+ is the
nominal speed or the base speed, but can be overclocked to even higher -
since 2800 is for the "general audience/customer"?

"Union Aerospace Corps." wrote:

Hi all AMD users!

All AMD chips are labelled as NNNN+ where NNNN is a four digit number.

Say if it's labelled as 2800+ does that mean it's a Pentium 4 equivalent of
a 2.8GHz chip? Surely, the 2800+ one doesn't even come near to 2.8GHz if you
look at the frequency which is at about 2GHz.

A centipede takes more steps per minute than a race horse, however you
wouldn't expect the centipede to win if the two raced. Why? Since the
horse goes much further with each step than the centipede, the horse
can make much more progress than the centipede even thought it
is taking much fewer steps per minute. In the same way, the Athlon XP
and Athlon 64 can outperform Pentium 4 chips which have much higher clock speeds
since the Athlons get more work done per clock cycle.



Also what does the "+" mean after the 2800?

Does it mean 2800+ is the
nominal speed or the base speed, but can be overclocked to even higher -
since 2800 is for the "general audience/customer"?

What? Speed is performance in applications, not clock speed. Look
at specific benchmarks to get specific performance for each processor.

On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 10:33:10 +0100, Union Aerospace Corps. wrote:

Hi all AMD users!

All AMD chips are labelled as NNNN+ where NNNN is a four digit number.

Say if it's labelled as 2800+ does that mean it's a Pentium 4 equivalent of
a 2.8GHz chip? Surely, the 2800+ one doesn't even come near to 2.8GHz if you
look at the frequency which is at about 2GHz.

Also what does the "+" mean after the 2800? Does it mean 2800+ is the
nominal speed or the base speed, but can be overclocked to even higher -
since 2800 is for the "general audience/customer"?

It's a fairly conservative rating, a 2800+ is at least as fast as a 2.8GHz
P4 on most applications. The performance curves for different processors
vary depending on the application. For normal computing applications AMD
processors blow Intel away however for multimedia type applications Intel
tends to have an advantage. I just got an AMD64 3400+ laptop and I've been
benchmarking it against my 2.66GHz Xeon server. The AMD64 3400+ is nearly
twice as fast as the 2.66 GHz Xeon doing verilog simulations with no disk
accesses (i.e. equivalent to a 5.2GHz Xeon). Doing Gcc it looks like a
3.79GHz Xeon. So the 3400+ number seems very conservative.

BTW Athlon64 is the way to go now, the XP is obsolete.

"Union Aerospace Corps." wrote in message
...
Hi all AMD users!

All AMD chips are labelled as NNNN+ where NNNN is a four digit number.

Say if it's labelled as 2800+ does that mean it's a Pentium 4 equivalent
of
a 2.8GHz chip? Surely, the 2800+ one doesn't even come near to 2.8GHz if
you
look at the frequency which is at about 2GHz.

Also what does the "+" mean after the 2800? Does it mean 2800+ is the
nominal speed or the base speed, but can be overclocked to even higher -
since 2800 is for the "general audience/customer"?



Since you're an obviouse Doom 3 fan you should consider dropping the P4 and
moving to an Athlon64.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2149

As you can plainly see from the above article, the integrated memory
controller on the Athlon64/FX makes a huge preformance difference for Doom 3
(and many games)... But since you ask, yes a xxxx+ Athlon will be just as
fast if not faster than a comprable P4. Next time you are in the market for
a new computer you should do a little research and find out which platform
will preform the best for your needs.

Carlo