how come intel boards hit 250FSB+ and AMD dont?

[gazzrawly]

i've noticed that AMD boards normally top out around 220-235mhz FSB when P4 tops out around 290-330mhz FSB. I know they r different chipsets and use different clock cycles but i still dont understand y there is such a big difference when using the same ram in some case's

[crotale]

It has nothing to do with the memory. It's all about the chipset and the surrounding design for Intel chips running 200+FSB.

[mrspec3]

AMD is crap....lol. When you compare chipsets Intel is way far ahead of AMD for speed and quality

Steve

[The Grouch]

Wow, such intellegent discussion!

[chasingapple]

You cant compare the 2...now stop with the Intel is better BS and run Super Pi against an AMD CPU...warning to you, you might cry :)

[shiyan]

I'm not sure actually. I don't think the P4 running at 200Mhz FSB is a valid reason for Intel chipsets being able to run at 250+ fsb.

The Barton 3200+ also runs at 200Mhz FSB, but that has not lead to the AMD chipsets being able to run at 250+ Mhz.

I guess the only thing that you can say is that it's due to the design limitations of the chipsets made for the AMD processors.

200+ Mhz fsb was achieved over a year ago with KT266A motherboards, but we haven't seemed to have moved on much since then.

Originally posted by mrspec3
AMD is crap....lol. When you compare chipsets Intel is way far ahead of AMD for speed and quality

Steve

you have some valid points, but you shouldn't word your post like this, as this would just lead to flaming from other people.

you can argue that at this moment in time, thanks to the quad pumped bus and the dual channel DDR, Intel has an edge on AMD in terms of RAM bandwidth.

but saying that the quality is higher is harder to justify.

and I don't think Intel's always been ahead of AMD.

if I remember correctly AMD were first to use DDR?

[Angry_Games]

main reason the P4 can hit such nice speeds is voltage & heat dissapation.

Look at a P4 and Athlon side by side. P4 is much smaller comparitively, and runs on less voltage. typical for P4 is 1.475-1.525.

Magical XP1700's and such that were rated at 1.5v would easily hit 700Mhz overclocks.

Watch a nicely cooled AMD cpu next to a P4 with stock heatsink. P4 almost always runs cooler, even overclocked. Heat spreader having such a large contact area has a lot to do with heat dissapation, and again, the voltage needed to power the cpu is less. I've hit 600Mhz overclocks at stock voltages on the P4.

Chipsets are very important. Not as important as chip design, heat dissapation, voltage. Intel chips are simply superior to AMD Athlons (trust me, it hurts to say it as I've hated Intel for longest time until I got a 2.4C + I875 Pro).

AMD probably was first to use DDR as Intel was tied up with that stupid RAMBUS and could not fab their own DDR chipsets. VIA took a bit to enter (I think they fought it out with Intel over making DDR chipsets and finally won). Either or, you give Intel a scare like AMD does about once per year, and they will use their nearly-unlimited resources to pound AMD back into the cellar.

Same thing is going to happen with 64-bit.

Intel scoffs at it and says its no big deal, but they are working furiously to get their I64-86 (not IA64 Itanium crap) extensions working without being able to fry your dinner on it lol. And they are watching AMD fumble with chipsets, pin counts, lack of 64-bit OS (sure there's linux, but linux doesn't run on 85% or more of the world's desktops so no Win64, no real reason to own an A64).

After the first of the year, Intel will have poured enough money into their 64-bit cpu or extensions, and they will probably be better/faster/cooler than AMD's.

So the battle goes. And lucky for us, it will rage on between them forever we hope. As long as it does, it means no more $1000 cpu's (or buying $100 cpu's and getting K6-2 performance out of them lol...remember those days?)

ok, babble done. bed now.

[JoT]

Originally posted by Angry_Games
main reason the P4 can hit such nice speeds is voltage & heat dissapation.

Look at a P4 and Athlon side by side. P4 is much smaller comparitively, and runs on less voltage. typical for P4 is 1.475-1.525.

Magical XP1700's and such that were rated at 1.5v would easily hit 700Mhz overclocks.

Watch a nicely cooled AMD cpu next to a P4 with stock heatsink. P4 almost always runs cooler, even overclocked. Heat spreader having such a large contact area has a lot to do with heat dissapation, and again, the voltage needed to power the cpu is less. I've hit 600Mhz overclocks at stock voltages on the P4.

Chipsets are very important. Not as important as chip design, heat dissapation, voltage. Intel chips are simply superior to AMD Athlons (trust me, it hurts to say it as I've hated Intel for longest time until I got a 2.4C + I875 Pro).

AMD probably was first to use DDR as Intel was tied up with that stupid RAMBUS and could not fab their own DDR chipsets. VIA took a bit to enter (I think they fought it out with Intel over making DDR chipsets and finally won). Either or, you give Intel a scare like AMD does about once per year, and they will use their nearly-unlimited resources to pound AMD back into the cellar.

Same thing is going to happen with 64-bit.

Intel scoffs at it and says its no big deal, but they are working furiously to get their I64-86 (not IA64 Itanium crap) extensions working without being able to fry your dinner on it lol. And they are watching AMD fumble with chipsets, pin counts, lack of 64-bit OS (sure there's linux, but linux doesn't run on 85% or more of the world's desktops so no Win64, no real reason to own an A64).

After the first of the year, Intel will have poured enough money into their 64-bit cpu or extensions, and they will probably be better/faster/cooler than AMD's.

So the battle goes. And lucky for us, it will rage on between them forever we hope. As long as it does, it means no more $1000 cpu's (or buying $100 cpu's and getting K6-2 performance out of them lol...remember those days?)

ok, babble done. bed now.

This is actually a very intelligent post, I commend thee :)

Intel's unlimited resources allow it to focus much more research on making the chips run cooler as well as have "uber" MHz.

And yes, Intel's "Quad-Pumped Bus" always allow it to get higher FSB.

[zachj]

First of all, what allows Intel CPUs to scale so high is not just to do with heat and voltage. Mainly, it's to do with CPU architecture. P4s don't do very much per clock cycle, and as a result, it can go faster. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel's architecture necessitates that it HAS to go faster to equal the performance of AMD chips. Because people see 3.2 GHz, they assume it's faster than 2.3GHz from AMD (I don't know what the top XP is in MHz). Intel has reached the ceiling of the P4 architecture, and if they get one or two more speed grades out of it, they'll probably be available in very limited quantities, cost tons of money, or Intel has found new mojo to work. Heat is low because voltage is low, and voltage is low because Intel took steps to make sure it was. AMD has high heat because its voltages are high because they won't run stable without a little more juice. It is absolutely incorrect to say Intel processors are faster than AMDs. First of all, it's not true, and second of all, that's not a productive comment, even if you can justify it with facts (because people can justify the oposite with facts, too). P4s have a larger contact surface because of the integrated heat spreader. Remove it, and the die is about the same size as AMDs (as far as I know, anyway).

Also, the quad pumped bus only affects the CPU, not the memory, so this has nothing to do with how fast the FSB can go, because it's only running at a quarter of what Intel's telling you (as you already know). Intel's 1MHz FSB is the same as AMD's 1MHz until it gets to the processor, so QPB means nothing in this regard. The reason Intel chipsets hit higher FSBs (not QPB) is because of the quality of the chipsets, and the resulting quality required of the mainboard to sustain such high speeds. NForce2 is an excellent chipset, but some of the boards are not nearly as good. Yes, Abit and Asus make both NForce2 and Canterwood boards, and their Intel boards go up to really high speeds, so it's not fair to say that all NForce2 boards are shoddily made. This is a limitation of the chipset.

Voltage isn't particularly important unless you need more to overclock. An XP at a much higher voltage than a P4 on a Promethia still won't overclock as high as a P4, and it's because of the architecture of the CPU. I think the math is like 1 Intel MHz is worth 60% of 1 AMD MHz, but I might be off on that.

I don't know if AMD was first to use DDR (PIIIs can use it), but they certainly beat Intel to 1GHz, and AMD's Athlon beat Intel's PIII for a very long time, in terms of performance. AMD is not screwing up right now, Microsoft is. AMD has a good 64-bit processor out right now, but Microsoft doesn't have the OS out yet. This is not AMD's fault. Intel might have more power over Microsoft than AMD, so if Intel had been the one doing this, we might have had a 64-bit OS already, but that's not the point. Intel is working frantically right now to get the Prescott to work at frequencies above the P4 and at heat levels below what AMD's XP never put out. It is simply hard to justify saying that Intel is better than AMD using those points.

It is generally agreed in this forum that Intel is better at certain things (multimedia, especially encoding), as well as things that rely more on raw MHz than on CPU architecture. AMD is better at different things, especially a lot of math applications, and at games, especially the new A64.

What you're reading on the front page regarding pin counts and such are much more a hypothetical scenario than current fact. What Ed's warning is that Intel is having a brain fart right now, and it is in AMD's best interests to capitalize on this period of evil over at Intel's HQ right now and in the near future. But that means that AMD is going to have to rectify a few current issues, as well as avoid creating any new ones. It is not to say that what's out now is bad. It's perfectly good. It's just in a package that's going to become obsolete. What comes in the new form factor (not 90nm, but the new socket) will be the same chip, just different numbers of pins.

I agree that Intel and AMD will be fighting this fight for a while, though, and it IS good for consumers, as it keeps prices where people can actually get a 500 dollar computer, which is what most people need.

Please try and avoid saying that Intel is better than AMD, especially when it's clearly not the case. I would say that Intel's competitor to AMD's K6-2 was "better", and I would say that AMD's original Athlon and Intel's original PentiumIII were both good, and whichever at the time had the highest speed in MHz was the fastest. I think everyone would agree that the original P4 was a dismal failure. And I would think that most people here would admit that the XP and P4 have been very good competitors, and AMD ran out of steam only recently, and even then, it competed well in most areas, beating Intel in quite a few.

Z

[Gnufsh]

I thought that the die size of the XP was smaller than the P4. The Thoroughbred rev B core is about 84 square mm, while the northwood P4 cae out at 146 square mm, if I remember correctly.

[deadkenny]

Intel clearly has the advantage at the high-end. That's not AMD screwing up. The fact that AMD was actually ahead for so long against Intel's Coppermine PIII and then Willamette P4's was actually Intel's screw up. Intel has much deeper pockets for R&D and has much greater influence in the market. No doubt if it was Intel pushing for 64bit, rather than AMD, M$ and the marketplace would be on board to a much greater extent. However, AMD still has a real lock on the 'bargain' niche. The fact is that the Celeron is crap and the Athlons a few notches below the top are a good price. Plus the multipliers on AMD processors are, to some extent, still unlocked making them more OC'er friendly.

[huneycutt]

Originally posted by mrspec3
AMD is crap....lol. When you compare chipsets Intel is way far ahead of AMD for speed and quality
Steve

That statement only serves to prove just how little you really know about AMD. Won't get in a pi----g contest but my 2500 Barton OC's 2.2GHz on air and cost $92.00 with the heat sink and fan and I have the three year AMD warranty. Your P4 2.4 GHz costs $164.00 so if you want to throw your money away, be my guest.

From what I read the 2500 Barton runs with the P4 2.8GHz because the Barton has the 512 cache and the P4 256. Now AMD comes out with the 64 bit CPU, so Intel needs to get themself together and "cache" up. :p Sometimes I crack myself up . . . .

[Gnufsh]

The northwood P4s also have 512K cache. But, the Athlon XP is much more efficient in terms of ammount of work done per clock cycle. It's shorter pipelines also make it suffer less from a branch misprediction. It also has a much better FPU as far as straight 387 code is concerned.

[Sasquach Jimmy]

That statement only serves to prove just how little you really know about AMD. Won't get in a pi----g contest but my 2500 Barton OC's 2.2GHz on air and cost $92.00 with the heat sink and fan and I have the three year AMD warranty. Your P4 2.4 GHz costs $164.00 so if you want to throw your money away, be my guest.

Haha yeah, intels may be better, but for the amount you would spend on an intel you could get a way faster amd...

BTW Intel has always sucked at putting enough cache memory in their processors, they have been doing it for the longest time now because less cache=lower cost=higher return, and at the same clock speed, it advertises exactly the same to the common idiot.

I think we are going to get to a point where the common idiot is going to be satisfied with older technology because it will still be fast enough to meet their needs. What will hopefully happen then is the companies will target peoples like us for their higher end equipment, and stop cutting corners...

[shiyan]

that will probably happen, but I'm hoping it won't happen.

I hope some application gets written so that we NEED more Mhz. that way, all the "Joe Sixpacks" as Ed puts it, will have to pay along with all of us overclockers for the R&D. That would keep prices low.

It is not in our best interest for the masses to say "enough speed".

[Sasquach Jimmy]

True, and it probably won't happen, because microsoft will probably put out some even more gaudy monstrosity than xp that will be even more demanding...

[deadkenny]

Good points. I wonder what percentage of computer users would in reality be perfectly fine running Windows 95B on say a PIII under 1GHz? Coming back to the original point of AMD vs. Intel, that's another point in favour of AMD with their performance per dollar advantage. It's hard to beat an AMD combo like a low-end 266MHz FSB AthlonXP and PC2100 DDR on an nForce2 m/b with an Intel solution for the same price. If that's all the processing power that you need, then why pay more, unless it's for bragging rights.

[Gnufsh]

Windows 200 would be a better choice than Windows 95B, and it doesn't require too many more resources.

[deadkenny]

Originally posted by Gnufsh
Windows 200 would be a better choice than Windows 95B, and it doesn't require too many more resources.

Windows 200? :p I assume you mean 2000. To tell you the truth, I've never been especially impressed with it in spite of the good rep. OK, so it doesn't 'crash' like the 9x family, but it does have a number of other 'issues' common to the Windows family. In my experience, XP has actually been the best O/S I've used, even though it's a resource hog. Hey, might as well use all this 'excessive' computing power somehow, right? :D

[Gnufsh]

Yeah, I mean windows 2000. I hate te stupid keyboard on this laptop. I've used windows 3.1, 3.1.1, 95, 95B, 98, 98SE, Me, NT4.1 (server), 2000pro, XP Home and XP pro. Windows 2000 is my favorite of them all. There's no excuse to be a resource hog. The inner workings of XP arn't that much different from 2000pro. It's just a minor version bump (NT5.0 -> NT5.1) and a resource hog gui coupled with a few very annoying things, that assumes I'm one step below a slug in intelligence, and need a GUI that looks it was designed with toddlers in mind. But I don't really care. A nice version of linux could be less resource hungry, it just has to be made easy to use.

[deadkenny]

I would tend to agree with you, but as I said my PC is so massively more powerful than it really needs to be for what I use it for, that I might as well have all the 'GUI' crap. 2K actually has some 'annoying' things as well. Guess it just depends on what you're used to. If efficiency really matter most, we'd all be running Linux.

[onx]

Originally posted by Sasquach Jimmy
True, and it probably won't happen, because microsoft will probably put out some even more gaudy monstrosity than xp that will be even more demanding...

M$ is making longhorn with just that in mind :)

I agree on the linux part, i have no problems with linux, and its great imo, very stable etc, but its really a b****. Its harder to use that I'd like, and since im lazy i just stick to windows :P and the only linux i run now is my friewall...its kinda freaky thou...it doesnt need reboots....its...unnatural :p

[repilce]

OKay i have it.. The non-technical REall f**n easy answer to all this without saying something about either one of the two companyies..

Just cause i have a 1000HP car that will smoke anything in a straight line for a shot distance... Doesn't mean i could whoop @ss on anything around a corner..


So given that .. just how "straight line" do you think computer work is..

[mrspec3]

huneycutt-

First of all....you know nothing about me so don't presume to tell me what I do and don't know. You however don't seem to know what your talking about.

1) The P4 has 512MB of cache and always has
2) Yes I know AMD costs less and is by far the price/performance winner. But if you want the fastest your simply going to have to go with intel. You said the 2500+ runs on par with the 2.8C...did you mean at stock speeds? People overclock both and since this is overclockers forums I think it only fair to compare the overclocked speeds :D .

I've had many AMD cpu's (4 XP1700's, 1 xp2500+, 2 1400 tbirds and a xp1600 pal). My best 1700 did 2614Mhz on air cooling with 2.025V :cool: but my barton 2500 overclocked like a dog (some do some don't). Then I got a P4 2.4C. It obviously cost more but the performance gain was worth the cost. I got that 2.4C to over 3.9Ghz with water/pelt cooling and I can tell you every benchmark was better and the feel of the computer was much faster.

But since this thread (nor my post) was ever about cpu's I will leave this alone

Now my first post.....was less than technical but I wasn't planning on all this back talk :p

Fact is Intel has a HUGE piece of the market and with that comes the funds for a great R&D dept. Notice that Intel makes thier own chipsets and not just cpu's. AMD relies on other companies like via, nvidia and sis to make the chipsets for their boards (that's both good and bad). The reason Intel chipsets let the fsb go so high has nothing to do with the CPU (directly). If you think about it since AMD has unlocked multies the cpu is not a limiting factor in max fsb when compaired to the impact it makes on Intel cpu's

[shiyan]

Originally posted by mrspec3
huneycutt-
1) The P4 has 512MB of cache and always has
2) Yes I know AMD costs less and is by far the price/performance winner. But if you want the fastest your simply going to have to go with intel. You said the 2500+ runs on par with the 2.8C...did you mean at stock speeds? People overclock both and since this is overclockers forums I think it only fair to compare the overclocked speeds :D .

just a few minor corrections...

Northwoods always had 512kb of cache, the Willamettes had 256kb of cache.

Intel is not fastest at everything, for example, in 3DMark2001, the AMD A64 3200+ is top dog at the moment.

If you look at benches including the 3.2EE and FX-51, none of the two can dominate the other. One wins some of the benchmarks, the other wins the remaining ones.

but you are right, we should get back to the subject at hand...

[mrspec3]

Originally posted by shiyan
If you look at benches including the 3.2EE and FX-51, none of the two can dominate the other. One wins some of the benchmarks, the other wins the remaining ones.

but you are right, we should get back to the subject at hand...

Too true....I keep forgetting about those $1000+ cpu's :D

Just kidding.

Back to the topic now :cool:

[Splinter]

Anytime you compare apples to oranges your going to run into differences despite the fact that they are both fruit. :):) All you have to decide is which fruit best nourishes your body.

[mrspec3]

Here we go.....

AMD@290FSB with insane timings

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21098

:D

[shiyan]

why's that person running the A64 3200+ at 1162Mhz? weird.

awsome fsb though.