i was just wondering how do u tell the speed of the AMD chip, like when u buy a pentium 4 3.0 ghz, u know right there that it's 3 ghz, but when u buy like an ATHLON 64 3200+, how fast is it? i heard some where that 3200 = 3.2 ghz? is this true?
Yes, just look at the sheet or specs it comes with. The 3200+ is NOT the GHz. The stat sheet on the site or the box will tell you. Also look for DUAL-Core or SINGLE-Core (Kind of self explanitory but that is double or single the GHz stating it simply)
the 3200+ bit means in relation to the original AMD Thunderbird 1.0ghz cpu. So 3200 means in relation to the old thunderbird its 3.2ghz however the concept is slipping as its not near exact anymore.
the numbers don't mean squat when comparing the clock speeds. a 2.0 ghz athlon will often outgamea 3.5ghz P4, but forgeneral use it is more compareable to a 2.6 ghz p4. the athlon X2s just annihilate though. the x2 3800+ outperms the Pentium d at 3.4ghz for virtrually everything, yet costs half as much and uses less energy. think about it this way: ghz typically = more power a good portion of a Pentium 4 or a Pentium Ds ghz are lost to error when the processors pipeline is flushed. there are other factors such as how efficient the core architecture is and how much cache there is on a chip, the latency of the cache and how much bandwidth the chip needs, but the above rules is a very simple(actually oversimplified) way of looking at it.
Dudes.... the thing that AMD has and Intel hasnt is simply the so called FSB (front side bus) AMD CPU (the socket 939) has a FSB of 2000 Mhz, Intel P4 series has 800 Mhz... Here is the diffrence... A bigger FSB is needed to do more things at the same time and to make more callculations a min.
the 2000mhz on the HTT bus aren't ass effective as on the FSB, they are equivilent to 1000mhz on the FSB in terms of bandwidth capacity. The advantage of HTT is that it is full duplex(data can be sent two ways at once) and that information can be sent directly fromone component to the other while FSB is half duplex and all data must go to the northbridge and then to the component. FYI, the bus bandwidth has relatively little impact on non-netburst chips like the athlons and core duos. doubling your rams bandwidth by putting it into dual channel configurations might net a 2-5% performance increase whereas doing so on a netburst system would result in closer to a 30% increase. Netburst is VERY bandwidth sensative. a higher band width won't result in more calculations being performed/mins though they will be executed faster. the advantage of HTT in that department is that it can transfer data with lower latency to other components for computation faster. also, the spped of the HTT bus is linked ot the ram and the bus multiplier. if you lower the buss multipier it iwll drop below 2000mhz, if you raise it it will go above it. if you raise your rams clock speed it will go above it(unless you lower the multi) etc. ultimately the max HTT bus speed is determined by the motherboard. the proc isn't that closely related to the max bus bandwidth as in FSB systems where it is locked(I might be mistaken on that, I've never OCed a non HTT system extensively) also don't judge just based on clock speed(ghz) a 3.0ghz P4 with 2mb cache can and will outperform a 4.0ghz P4 with 256mb cache(aka celeron D) in a fair amount of instances
hahaha Xelink knows what hes talking about These questions pop up all the time To me numbers dont mean anything ie GHZ wise - You have to go beyond the 'GHZ' formality and check the tech specs to find out whats better and whats not I think the rest is explained in Mr.Xelink's post
