AMD XP 2600 != 2.6 Ghz?

[Kraelis]

The title says it all. Mine clocks at 2.0+ Ghz. I assumed 2600 would mean 2.6 Ghz. Ah well...

Any explanations for this one?

Thanks.

[Stifmeist]

A AMD Athlon XP 2600+ has the same ghz like an Intel Pentium 4 2600 GHz.
The amd frequency is lower tahn the IP4

Understand?

[Raziel]

Weird explanation Stifmeist

Anyway, AMD's rating is based on the performance of the processor compared to the original athlon (well, at least for XP processors, the Athlon64 rating sucks IMO), see, an athlon XP 2600 would be equivalent in performance to an old athlon 2.6 GHz (if it could be clocked that high).

[Stifmeist]

>>Athlon64 rating sucks IMO

NO! It rox0rz

[Kraelis]

Um... still a tad confused. So the 2.0++ I'm seeing is?

I thought the Hertz IS the clock frequency. That's what I remember from college physics.

Anyway... sorry for beeing a n00b with hardware. Having spent almost 9 years with substandard equipment has taken its toll...

[Stifmeist]

is liek an IP4 2600MHz

[Kraelis]

Yeah, but the bios and all other software report it as 2.0++. Or is it a case of having lower clock frequency yet being able to match that speed?

[fenris-wolf]

AMD's rating can be a bit confusing if you aren't familiar with them but as for a XP 2600

Model: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
Core: Thoroughbred
Operating Frequency: 2.13GHz
FSB: 266 MHz
Cache: L1/64K+64K; L2/ 256KB
Voltage: 1.65V
Process: 0.13Micron
Socket: Socket A
Multimedia Instruction: MMX, SSE, 3DNOW!, 3DNOW!+

The 2600xp is supposed to run at about 2.13 Ghz.

[Kraelis]

Thanks. I wonder why the heck they did that. Rather misleading, I must say.

[Noxious Ninja]

That's because way back before Intel upped the cache on the P4, an Athlon XP 1800+ would be a bit faster than a P4 1.8GHz, even though it was clocked quite a bit slower. Now that Intel has improved the P4, the ratings don't really mean anything, except as model numbers. Even then, you have to use model number + core.

AMD has always said it means the rough equivalent of an old Athlon, but I don't really believe it.

[stilz]

www.tomshardware.com
If you find some older CPU benchmark to read, you'll understand what they are talking about. So there is nothing weird about your 2600+ clocked at 2.0Ghz at all; the Athlon XPs have always been like that.

[MaZa]

Clock speed isnt all and everything. 2600+, even thought lower clock than p4 2.6, is about equally fast. Actually P4 (original. Northwood improved a lot) is quite slow processor overall because of way its built. Meaning, IF there would be 2GHz P3 (which is impossible since P3 cannot handle it) and 2GHz P4, P3 would clearly beat P4. Overall architecture of P4 is slower than AMD, but it can handle more raw power (clocks) so it can match speed with AMD ones.

[Roman]

You can match this with play station 2 - it has cpu only clocked 300 mhz, and if you have one you can see the power of this cpu. Even if athlon is clocked 2.18 ghz it can be so fast as pentium 4.

[stilz]

Is there a way to compare PS2's CPU speed to PC CPU's? Just curious.

[GiGaHeRz]

No, they are totally different architectures. You could compare the performance with a concrete algorithm only, but not general speed. Also, the ps2 has 2 VUs, that are independent vector processors (not like vertex shaders, but complete processors dedicated to vectorial calculation).

You can compare amd's athlon xp speed to intel's P4 speed because they are both x86, so they share the same (basic) instruction set and registers, but they are actually different cpus, so there is also a variation in concrete instructions & optimization methods.

[Roman]

Ehm ... it`s not the point ... I haven`t told you to compare ps2 cpu to pc one. I have just told, that mhz of your cpu isn`t everything, as is with athlon. Even if it has lower mhz it has more advanced instructions than p4. That was all that I wanted to tell you. I didn`t want to compare ps2 cpu with pc cpu. That was only egzample of procesor with low mhz, which can do really beautiful things. So you have simply mistaken what I had on my mind. So that would be all.

[[Thoughtless]]

uhm...If I havent mistake here, but the fastest Athlon XP cpu is clocked at 2.16 GHZ. With a little ocing I think it will hit 2.4 ghz at least.

[Noxious Ninja]

The 3200+ is clocked at 2.2 GHz. Mobile Bartons have been known to hit 2.5 GHz.

[I-Chan]

Originally Posted by Roman

Ehm ... it`s not the point ... I haven`t told you to compare ps2 cpu to pc one. I have just told, that mhz of your cpu isn`t everything, as is with athlon. Even if it has lower mhz it has more advanced instructions than p4. That was all that I wanted to tell you. I didn`t want to compare ps2 cpu with pc cpu. That was only egzample of procesor with low mhz, which can do really beautiful things. So you have simply mistaken what I had on my mind. So that would be all.

He was answering to stilz, not you.

Originally Posted by stilz

Is there a way to compare PS2's CPU speed to PC CPU's? Just curious.

see?

[Demigod]

Originally Posted by Kraelis

Thanks. I wonder why the heck they did that. Rather misleading, I must say.

It's a marketing technique employed by AMD to sell chips and make the Athlon XP more comparable to the Pentium 4 (despite what AMD says). When people see Athlon XP 1.8 Ghz vs Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz it's obvious which they'll go for. It's worked pretty well when comparing the two CPUs but AMD should be a bit more honest about it (state the clock speed as well). It is quite misleading and the majority of users are tricked into thinking it's the actual clock speed as you've been. Of course the performance is still there but it's still hugely misleading and AMD does it intentionally.

You can rest assured that you didn't get a slower performing chip to the P4 2.6 Ghz though. The Athlon XP has features that make it perform superior to the P4 at the same clock speed (shorter pipeline, more execution units, and better FPU). It performs relatively the same and has the same x86 instruction set as well as most of Intel's SIMD instructions (exception is SSE2).

Originally Posted by Roman

You can match this with play station 2 - it has cpu only clocked 300 mhz, and if you have one you can see the power of this cpu. Even if athlon is clocked 2.18 ghz it can be so fast as pentium 4.

Not to start a PC vs console thread but a lot of the CPU's power in a PC goes to the operating system. The PC is a general-purpose machine with a general-purpose CPU and an OS like Windows has a lot of overhead. It has to manage things like the GUI, word processing, fonts, networking, and has several dozen processes and services running in the background. The XBOX only needs to focus on gaming and although it only utilizes a Pentium 3 Celeron at 700 Mhz and a modified GeForce 3 but can run advanced games like Halo and Doom 3 which would be impossible for a PC with the same specs. In short, you can't really say a certain CPU is superior to another when running on different platforms and under different optimizations.

Originally Posted by GiGaHeRz

You can compare amd's athlon xp speed to intel's P4 speed because they are both x86, so they share the same (basic) instruction set and registers, but they are actually different cpus, so there is also a variation in concrete instructions & optimization methods.

That's not entirely true. Not all x86 CPUs can be compared equally in speed. The Intel 80486 has the same x86-32 instructions as the Pentium 3 but when running the same code (non-optimized x86-32 code) at the same clock speed the P3 will perform much faster. Certain x86 CPUs also only run optimized for certain sequence of instructions (like the FPU unit of the K6) and VIA/Cyrix CPUs also perform a lot different from Intel and AMD ones, although they're also x86. The significance of the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 being both x86 processors is that they can run the same software (compatibility) but doesn't necessarily mean their performance is comparable as their architecture and technology are radically different. Of course comparisons are easier between them as you can run the same software on both but they'll run different based on optimizations and exact comparisons are actually quite difficult (SSE2 doubles the P4's FP performance and multi-threaded apps increase performance by 30%). In certain software the Athlon will perform better, in others the P4 will and there's no definitive line on speed. In short, two processors can share the same instruction set architecture but perform a lot different and aren't equally comparable in their processing speed. For example, the Itanium 2 has twice the integer performance of the Itanium 1 but they're both IA-64 processors.