The Intel Vs AMD debate

For as long as one can remember there has always been (and will also always be) the debate between Intel and AMD. This never ending story continues to live forward but what are the facts at this moment in time? It is not as simple to state clearly whether the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP is the best CPU but what is certain is that the Athlon XP is getting a somewhat long in the tooth. The K7 architecture leaves little headroom to clock much higher thus now more than ever puts pressure on AMD to shock Intel executives with a new toy, the Athlon 64. All be well this new design should come alive come September or AMD and its fan hope. Intel on the other hand is also not asleep despite it comfortable position presently dominating the market with the Pentium 4 that has to be said has become in less than three years a true performer eliminating most of its shortcomings upon launch. Now with the Pentium 4 at 3.2GHz Intel hopes to dominate the mainstream personal computer market without any threat from AMD, this looks promising as we still have some time until that Athlon 64 launch we mentioned above. And as the debate continues so does the spur or yet new processors with Intel also planning to showcase its 90nm process revamped Netburst architecture. With this having SSE3, 1MB L2 Cache, 24K L1/Trace cache and improved Hyper Threading it’s bound not to appear quietly. Overclockers no doubt are pleased some and then some more with cheap Pentium 4’s such as 2.4C or 2.6C, these in turn prove to overclock so well it’s almost fantastic to own one. Athlon XP also overclock but there increase is MHz is sadly nothing major. At the moment the ball has to fall in Intel’s courtyard, they presently produce and sell the most versatile performing CPU on the market. AMD has of late been too busy playing the performance rating number game by adding L2 cache and recently a 400MHz FSB but little in the form of internal core clock speed. The debate shall never fall to the ground but should AMD deliver its upcoming Ahtlon 64 in style AND fairly increased clock speeds things could well sway in AMD’s favour. We’ll check back to this topic in our next CPU review.

New chipsets and 800MHz FSB Pentium 4’s, an industry perspective

Throughout the course of this article we have discussed the various new technologies brought to the forefront but what we haven’t in reality addressed is how these could benefit or offer little improvement to the potential customer, in other words the end user. All these enhancements aim to deliver a rich multimedia experience nevertheless how much is this affect meaningful if for example you only use a computer for word processing or email? This question is not fresh and has been raised one way or the other for about three years. For many who perform basic office work the performance bar has already been taken to a level that satisfies them. Jumping on the latest hardware would give modest gains, after all today’s systems sit largely idle at the dullness of our slow typing abilities or infrequent mouse clicks. In such a scenario every clock cycle, MHz rating or step up in throughput doesn’t serve much use however areas in the industry where these boosts are most welcome do exist. Video/Audio manipulation is a key region where the yearning for yet more speed is always met with joy but then so is gaming. These two types of software endlessly pursue eating away at system performance never saying no to what is offered them in terms of raw power. While the 800MHz FSB and now mainstream Hyper Threading were never intended to replace pure clock speeds they are the force behind superior efficiency as well as a lean from progressing ahead purely via internal CPU frequencies.