With the Celeron, you get full speed L2 cache, faster FPU and better memory throughput.

The K6 will probably outshine the Celeron in basic benchmarks and basic applications like word processing due to better integer performance among other features. That's about it. You might find plenty of DOS games that run faster as well. However, at that speed range, either is most likely overkill for DOS and will be sure to ruin many older games.

Also, while it's not a fault of the K6 itself which is really a good chip, it seems most AMD cpus get paired with absolute rubbish motherboards that can only be called great if you're focusing on a price to performance standpoint.

Thanks for the input - my experience has been that running Quake in software rendering in any higher resolutions (even 640x 480) requires a pretty hefty processor

yeah you'll want to go Intel if you wish to play a hi-res Quake software game. Now try loading fastvid up on the celeron 533 before running Quake and see it further curbstomp the k6-2 😀

It also excels at MMX implementation.

The Celeron 533 might be pushing it so I wouldn't try but I know if you had a 300A or 333, you could easily put the thing on a 100mhz bus and performance would be miles ahead of anything you could get with a K6.

Main reason for this is that the Intel CPU has a much stronger floating point unit (FPU) which 3d games like Quake utilise pretty heavily.

This is true for pretty much all Socket 7 processors - Pentiums had the strongest FPU of that platform, and none of the AMD, Cyrix, etc chips could match it. I've seen benchmarks where an K6-2 or K6-3 couldn't match a Pentium running 100MHz slower in FPU performance.
The same holds true into the slot 1/S370 era as you see here- Super Socket 7 processors can't match Intel CPU's in FPU intensive tasks like 3d games.

It wasn't until Athlon that AMD really sorted out their FPU performance, and Athlon actually became a very good option for 3d gaming.

Yep, I'm pretty sure that if you could clock a Pentium MMX as high as a K6-2 it would best it.
For their time though, they're awesome cpus, very cheap in comparison to Intel. Nowdays... meh... You're better off with an Intel processor. Athlons are great CPUs, chipsets however are awful. A shame too...

Pair an Athlon XP with an nForce 2 chipset and you'll have a pretty nice system. A Pentium 4 of same clock speed with DDR or Rambus will still outperform it though. Never the less, the performance gap between an Athlon XP with a good motherboard and chipset and a Pentium 4 isn't nearly as pronounced as the gap between the K6 and Celeron/Pentium II.

Also, at least in the early 2000s, even with the performance difference, if you were on a tight budget, you typically would do much better getting a Duron instead of a Celeron. The Durons were quite good performers and the money you saved was typically enough to get more RAM, a better video card or a larger hard drive. Also keep in mind that Intel based systems in the same price range as comparable AMD systems back in 2000 typically had the i810 chipset which, while a competent performer, wasn't exactly something you'd want to show up to a LAN party with. Basically, you were choosing between something that started high end and was stripped down until cheap (Intel) or something designed to implement specific features at a certain cost (AMD). I feel both solutions have equal number of positives and negatives.

Come to think of it, the same argument is why people bought K6 systems in the 90s. AMD chips seemed to always have the price to performance edge and provided a better value. However, flash forward to present day when most parts past ten years old are worth about the same and you're better off building with Intel parts unless you have a certain fondness for AMD.

Agreed, although nForce 2 is a little late to the party, great chipset however.
Never tried a Duron unfortunately, but the Celerons (not the first ones though 😜) were really good processors. If you used the 100MHz bus it could outperform a Pentium 2/3 at the same clock depending on cache requirements 😉

nForce 2 has the added benefit that you don't have to go looking for a good audio card. The nForce 2 audio is probably the best chipset audio you'll find, at least from the time. If you come across one of the more elaborate boards like the DFI LanParty mobo I built my mom's computer with, you can really have some fun.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1527

The Durons were always a weird chip. They used whatever manufacturing process was behind the newest Athlons, typically came in ceramic packaging, always had lower clock and bus speed and only 4kb of L2 cache. However, AMD put some serious work into various tweaks in the core. The seemingly miniscule L2 cache was never regarded as a significant bottleneck with the chips. In actual use, they're competent and reliable chips but plagued by the same problem as the Athlons of the time (and possibly worse) in that most were paired with rubbish chipsets and motherboards.

Pair an Athlon XP with an nForce 2 chipset and you'll have a pretty nice system. A Pentium 4 of same clock speed with DDR or Rambus will still outperform it though

I disagree. Perhaps if you were talking about the Athlon XP's model numbers compared to the Pentium 4's clockspeed then you might be correct in some cases - but I'd still argue that this isn't true in the earlier Palomino days, when there wasn't such a big gap between model numbers and the Athlon's clockspeed.

Of course there were some benchmarks that heavily favoured the P4 due to SSE2 which the Athlon didn't support but in the real world the Athlon faster clock for clock.

Here are some benchmarks and reviews of P4 versus Athlon:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1004/1
http://www.anandtech.com/show/835/1
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pentium-4,407.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-xp … ets-p4,383.html

I built a few P4 and Athlon XP systems back in the day and I also generally found the Athlons to be faster, and better value for money, in my own experience.

It's hard to really take benchmarks seriously. AMDs, since K6 days, have always had an upper hand in many popular benchmarks. Windows might even boot faster and open small programs quicker. However, in my experience, the increased memory throughput of the Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP makes a significant difference in running current software now and that Pentium 4 systems generally could take more of a load before starting to slug out. Of course, SSE helps as well.

Though I suppose with radically different designs, both chips would have their own advantages which cater to different users who do different tasks with their PCs. That's probably part of why the argument as to which is better will never end.

EDIT: In retrospect, one must imagine if AMD never succeeded with the Athlon and K6 cpus. Intel was forced to acknowledge AMD had some competitive products and thus, we had a pretty healthy technology race. At the same time, one must also imagine if there never was much competition. Would the chip makers simply take advantage by continuing lesser designs or would they take advantage of having more time to refine each new product. After all, on both sides, there were a couple of dud products pushed out simply for the sake of buying time. Also, most notably in Intel's case, a good design (NetBurst) was pretty bastardized with long pipelines and premature designs being released in the name of having the fastest cpu on market.

That's probably part of why the argument as to which is better will never end.

That's for sure... I remember many a heated debate almost a decade ago between staunch defenders of both camps...

In the P4's favour was the fact that they often overclocked a lot higher than the Athlons did.

In retrospect, one must imagine if AMD never succeeded with the Athlon and K6 cpus. Intel was forced to acknowledge AMD had some competitive products and thus, we had a pretty healthy technology race. At the same time, one must also imagine if there never was much competition. Would the chip makers simply take advantage by continuing lesser designs or would they take advantage of having more time to refine each new product. After all, on both sides, there were a couple of dud products pushed out simply for the sake of buying time. Also, most notably in Intel's case, a good design (NetBurst) was pretty bastardized with long pipelines and premature designs being released in the name of having the fastest cpu on market.

Well I think its a safe assumption that Intel's prices would be a lot higher, if their behaviour in the 80s/90s is anything to go by. Without competition from AMD et al Intel would basically have had a monopoly in the IBM compatible market. I also suspect that Intel would have pushed ahead with the P6 architecture instead of Netburst.

I'm thinking of phasing out my K6-2 systems - I have three. With voodoo cards it makes a good box for half-life and unreal (but not much else). With a P3 you can do the same thing but also have a system that's powerful enough for other things (shrug)

Yeah K6 systems have a lot of limitations. I have lost most of my interest in that hardware. The real killer was when I did a little comparison of a Voodoo5 in both a K6-3+ 600 and a P3 450. The P3 stomped the much higher clocked K6 in UT99.

Throw in how the AGP port on MVP3 and Aladdin 5 boards isn't exactly stable and I just don't care to bother with it anymore.

People say K6-2 was as fast as pentium. But my experiences in things like rendering. mp3 encoding, video encoding - a k6 was 1/2 the speed of a same-clockspeed p3. (Yeah I know, all those tasks involve floating point math, and that was K6's weakness)

ncmark wrote:

I'm thinking of phasing out my K6-2 systems - I have three.

Certainly can't see why you'd need three of them 😜.

ncmark wrote:

People say K6-2 was as fast as pentium. But my experiences in things like rendering. mp3 encoding, video encoding - a k6 was 1/2 the speed of a same-clockspeed p3. (Yeah I know, all those tasks involve floating point math, and that was K6's weakness)

I think a Pentium 2 would be a fairer comparison to the K6-2 - they were both out around the same time (The K6-2 had been on the market for a year before the P3 arrived) and a lot of those tasks you mentioned are helped by SSE, which the P3 supports but the P2 or K6-2 doesn't.

The K6-3 was on the market against the P3, and it had additional on-die L2 cache to help it along, but still no SSE... things that use SSE will always be faster on the P3.

Well K6-2 would be equal footing to the P3 due to 3DNow! extensions - P3's equivelant to that is SSE, and P3 is just P2 with SSE.

Though, K6-2's cycles per clock sucked, and its heat...

P2 was hotter though, especially the Klamath version.

Obviously P3 is a better architecture then K6-X, but Super 7 still has some benefits. Unreal ran great on my K6-III/400 + V2

The PGA370 Celeron was pretty good till it reached around 500Mhz. Around that time it's limited 66Mhz FSB started becoming too much of a limit. I wouldn't bother with any of the Coppermine Celerons below 800Mhz