BSA Starfire wrote:
I think the Athlon "Thunderbirds" were faster than PIII "Coppermine" & early P4 "Willamette", they were actually available to buy too, unlike the coppermine CPU's that were barely available for a good while outside OEM boxes.
They are. FPU performance at least, on a 1333MHz athlon beats a 1.4GHz tualatin hands down - both in synthetics and games. DK2 alone (@1600x1200, 32bit, max detail) runs fluently on said 1333MHz Athlon / Abit KT133 / GF4 Ti4200, while my 1.4GHz tualatin / Asus ti4600 struggles badly at the same resolution, getting massive framerate drops when zooming out and when lots of creatures are on screen. Same for black and white 1. This game performs rather poorly on both systems, but is noticeably faster on the athlon.
On-topic, the Athlon and Athlon XP were faster clock per clock then their intel counterparts. The 3200+ running at 2.2GHz equals a 3GHz Prescott in most apps and games, although the P4, especially the Prescott and Gallatin have very good FPU performance and do great in games. I remember back in the day, an Athlon XP 1700+ @ 1.5GHz beat the crap out of the 1.7GHz Willamette. even after Northwoods came out, the entry level Athlons were still faster then equivalent P4 chips. The gap only closes on high end chips, like the aforementioned 3200+ and 3GHz P4 Prescott, with the 3.2GHz Prescott equaling the 3200+ Barton and beating in some apps/games, due to greatly increased L2 cache size (from 256kb on the Willamette to 1MB on the Prescott and 2MB on the Gallatin) as well as greatly increased FSB and clock speeds. It seems Netburst loves lots of L2 cache, high FSB and high clock speeds, and needs these to perform well.
I've recently discovered that 478 machines do have a great advantage over socket A when it comes to top-of-the-line models - overclokability. While a 1.5GHz 1700+ can sometimes overclock to 1833MHz and a 2500+ Barton will often overclock to 3200+ levels (2.2GHz from 1833MHz by setting the FSB from 166 to 200), so will equivalent intel chips. A 2.4GHz P4 will most often comfortably run at 2998MHz, and require less voltage to do so (most 2500+ chips need 1.65 to 1.7v to run at 2.2GHz stable, while the 2400Mhz northwood will do so @ 1.52v most of the time (from a stock 1.45v). It gets even worse on high performance chips. A 3200+ will run at 2.4, 2.5GHz tops, and this on unlocked chips that allow changing the multiplier, or on modded chips. At 2.5GHz a 3200+ will want 1.75-1.8v witch is a lot of juice. Your garden variety prescott will OC from 3000 to 3660MHz (240-244MHz FSB) and some "golden chips" will go even higher on a good motherboard (4GHz on a Abit IC7 @ 1.49v). On the other hand, they will make A LOT of heat and draw insane amounts of power. For example, said 3200+ running @ 2.5GHz / 1.698v will top out at 72C on a regular arctic cooling copper lite, while the prescott @ 4GHz / 1.49v will go up over 80C, even tough I was using a huge tuniq tower 120.
Later AMD launched the Athlon64 witch was clearly superior over intel's offerings at the time. AMD had the fastest chips until intel released the Centrino and Core 2 Duo series.