One-Gigahertz Processors? We Say Skip 'Em! Sure 1 Ghz sounds impressive. But for our money, we'd buy a slower system, and get nearly as much performance. By Patrick Norton March 14, 2000 Set the anti-hype guns to kill, campers. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard the news that AMD has won the great race to the 1 gigahertz (a k a, 1,000 MHz, or the 1 GHz) barrier with the 1-GHz Athlon processor. Sound amazing? Sort of... We've got a problem with the new processors, however. While both these chips are hot, truth is, they don't offer a huge performance advantage over 800-MHz systems. Since those 800-MHz systems, whether powered by AMD or Intel, cost hundreds less, we say skip the 1-GHz chips for now. How many hundreds? The Intel 1-Ghz chips runs $990, while the 800 MHz costs around $800. That's a moderate savings of $190. AMD's Athlon 1-GHz chip, however, costs $1,299, while the 800-MHz Athlon chip it barely outperforms in business applications costs a mere $525. That's a huge savings! But Who’s Faster: AMD or Intel? AMD or Intel? Glad you asked. We've benchmarked AMD 1-GHz systems from Compaq and Polywell. While we can't seem to pry an Intel 1-GHz system out of Dell, HP, or IBM (the three companies building systems with this processor), we've seen PC Magazine's numbers on systems from Dell, IBM, and HP. In a well equipped system, the 1-GHz Pentium III is faster in everything but floating point performance. While AMD's core has a more advanced design, the on-die L2 cache on the Pentium III, which runs at the full processor speed, offers some serious I/O performance. That's crucial for any kind of processing. On the 1-GHz Athlon, the L2 cache currently runs at one-third the processor speed, 333 MHz. That's significantly slower. That doesn't quite explain the Pentium III's advantage in 3D graphics, especially given that all the testbeds involved. Both AMD and Intel used nVidia GeForce 256 DDR graphics cards. According to PC Mag, Intel's latest tweaks to the Pentium III's Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) now process twice the amound of data (four 32-bit entires, versus two for the Athlon) compared to the Athlon's Enhanced 3DNow! instructions. What does that mean? We'd guess that since DirectX 7 (Microsoft's 3D gaming API) takes advanteage of both processors streaming instructions, the processor that cranks 'em out faster wins. Judging from 3D WinMark 2000, that's the Pentium III. ZDTV Freshgear |
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