P4s aren't THAT bad, it's just that they aren't, well good for the $ and heat used. if you have a decent set up, keep what you have. Again, if you have one, don't run out and replace it if it works perfectly fine. If you have to buy new though, that is another story... Merom & Conroe(Intels next processor) won't have issues like P4s either. Think of it as an improved version of the Pentium M with two cores, a lot of energy efficient capabilitiesm a ton of L2 cache, and AMD64 technology(oops I meant EMT64)With any luck, they won't F' it up, I hope performance/watt doesn't go to their head, because I can afford to pump 90W through my CPU(like athlons and PIIIs) and 35 is rediculous... then again, this could mean mass overclocking... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conroe we'll see.
just a question , whats the GHz , like the amd athlon 64 3000+ is 2.0 GHz , the higher the better? cuz if thats the case thin my intel is better than all the athlons , cuz its 2.66 GHz
if the AMD64 has 2.0 and 1500 whatever Cache then the AMD is gonna perform faster than the Intel with 2.26 and 800 i think its front side bus actually cant remember Edit 1500 Mhz FSB 800 MHz FSB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_side_bus
i dont get it , isnt a good processor supposed to have high GHz , thin why the hell does my intel have more than a 3400+ athlon
Amd and Intel do it differently, a 2.6ghz amd processor (the best you can buy i think) will wipe the floor with a 2.6ghz intel. dja
Think of Intel processors as a sprinter they want fast speed clocks. think of AMD as a marathon runners, they want want speed but they also want to pace themselves. Intel have faster cores but their FSB are usually small. amd usually prefer big FSBs so they are able to processor more stuff in the end.
Athlon 64s do 12 calculations per clock, while netburst based processors do either 6 or 12 depending on the situation. What you said sin't entirely accurate. As for the clock speed = more power thing being true... theoretically yes, but in practice not always. Pentium 4s have just two ALUs which perform twice as many calculations per clock as Athlons(though athlons have 3 ALUs) Thus basic mathematical operations are performaed with twice as many calculations per clock, 12 while other calculations on P4s and other net burst processors perform just 6 calculations per clock. Also is the method by which Netburst generates such high clock speeds which downgrades performance. Current Pentium 4s and Pentium Ds have a 31 stage pipeline(which makes increasing clock speeds easier) which would be fine if it didn't increase the chance of the processor of performing an error. Each time a P4 performs an error, the pipeline must be flished and clocks are wasted. Branch prediction algorithms attempt to fix this, but don't do as great a job as they should. Athlon 64s have either a 10 stage pipeline or a 12 stage pipeline and are thus far less susecptible to error. Also the issue of L2 cache arises. Cache stores small amounts of data temporarily before transfering it to ram, since net burst processors are prone to error, they need a relatively high amount of this to store data in as to prevent it from being wasted when the cache is flushed. Just to put it in retrospective, Intel will be replacing their P4s with 2.2Ghz Meroms.
