CPu Of choice

[furious trout]

Right people help me out here.

i'm planning my new rig at the moment and i'm in a bit of a quandry i was going down the intel route, but i've been reading up on the Athlon 64's and they do interest me (enough to put a spanner in the works!). i'm not massively keen on going for a Northwood P4 now Prescott is on the scene, but on the other hand i'm not gonna go for Prescott untill the perfomance starts to improve (probably with the move away from the skt 478 config)

So i find myself in a bit of a pickle. What would you do? ;)

[Darv]

Well I'm an AMD fan so I'm a little biased here, but I still reckon the 64 would be a better choice.

It has great performance for not too high a price, it's future proof to an extent and I feel things can only get better for it as time goes by. I would say the Pentium 4 has had its peak by now. I can't see ti getting much better than it really is now.


If you decide on the 64 I would wait until for new 939(I think) chips and boards. Then you really will see the difference

[furious trout]

one thing i forgt to mention before - is there a real benfit to be had going for the 64 bit route when your not using a 64bit o/s or apps? I know MS has the XP beta but i'd be looking for something a little bit more reliable (however i don't have the time to start learing Linux :p )

[Darv]

Well they still have amazing performance with 32bit applications. Then when 64bit application and O/S's become more available you will get even more performance B)

[fillip]

I'm with Darv (AMD fan also)
From what i've heard the AMD 64 still absolutely flies compared to its contemporary's even on am 32 bit app.

I like the idea of a processor that has some unlocked potential too - it's not gonna be totally out dated in 6 mnths time
Plus the price, OMFG Athlon 64 3200 @ ebuyer for just a shade over £200

I've noticed that since AMD started stealing market share off intel, the price gap between the two hasd closed considerably (intel paranoia about being outstripped by the little guys!! :p )

AMD all the way

[bigZ]

I'll tell you once I've had a play with both ;)

I'd probably go with the Athlon 64 over the prescott at the moment, from the benchmarks that I've seen, the A64 is coming out on top, but then the new round of sockets is out soon, so that should be very interesting. I honesty can't wait for socket 939, Anand published an updated AMD roadmap earlier, showing how AMD has re-vamped their PR values with the new socket, clock for clock, they're saying that the socket 939 A64s with 512k cache and dual channel are 100 "points" faster than the socket 754 A64s with 1Mb cache and single channel. We shall see soon :)

[Grand Monkey]

i hear the current prescotts are good for overclocking if you got the cooling because intel are wanting to ramp up the speeds quickly(supposedly someone got one to 5ghz), but i have only seen big scores out of those with some form of phase changing. so i'm not sure. maybe bigz can clear that one up as he is our guru on the overclock.

[furious trout]

Originally posted by bigZ@Mar 5 2004, 01:45 AM
but then the new round of sockets is out soon, so that should be very interesting. I honesty can't wait for socket 939,
Any idea of when these will be released?

[fillip]

Originally posted by furious trout+Mar 5 2004, 10:30 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (furious trout @ Mar 5 2004, 10:30 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-bigZ@Mar 5 2004, 01:45 AM
but then the new round of sockets is out soon, so that should be very interesting.&nbsp; I honesty can't wait for socket 939,
Any idea of when these will be released? [/b][/quote]
Yeah, any ideas? i didnt know they were planning on yet another revision w/ a different socket. Glad i havent rushed out to buy 754 board :D

[Grand Monkey]

"AMD's 90nm Athlon 64 and Opteron chips will start rolling off the company's Dresden production line in the second week of April, but you won't be able to buy a machine based on the parts until late Q3 / early Q4.".
thats from the register.
i have heard rumours though that even when they do come out they will only be available in very limited numbers to begin with.

[furious trout]

Originally posted by Grand Monkey@Mar 5 2004, 11:36 AM
"AMD's 90nm Athlon 64 and Opteron chips will start rolling off the company's Dresden production line in the second week of April, but you won't be able to buy a machine based on the parts until late Q3 / early Q4.".
thats from the register.
i have heard rumours though that even when they do come out they will only be available in very limited numbers to begin with.
:( well that's a bit of a blow i must say.....Although it wasn't gonna happen over night* i ws hoping to be up and running before that


*Still in protracted negotiations with gf over funding options, apparently paying this mortgage thingy has to come first :angry:

[bigZ]

Socket 939 is coming VERY soon, by the end of March/beginning of April, I'll get more information on this as soon as I know myself. LGA775 isn't far away either, towards the middle of April is when that comes about as far as I know. There won't be anything other than the FX-53 on socket 939 until late April/Early may though.

The Prescott is very slow in comparison to the Northwood, due to it's larger pipeline, there is 31 instructions in the pipeline rather than 18 in the Northwood. This is a quote from SharyExtreme to explain this...

Basically, Intel has taken the Northwood cache specifications and doubled them. The Prescott core includes a full 16K of L1 cache (8K for the Northwood) and a whopping 1-MB of L2 cache (512K - Northwood), and this double-play goes farther than any previous Pentium 4 core revision. Not only has the L1 cache doubled in size, but it has also moved from 4-way associative (Northwood) to 8-way for the Prescott core. The 1-MB L2 cache is also double that of the Northwood, but its specifications remain consistent at 8-way associative in 128-byte lines.

The other major shift is in manufacturing process, and the Prescott is built upon a 90nm (0.09-micron) process technology, thereby allowing Intel to reach this level ahead of AMD, in the desktop market. These are both important facets of the Prescott core, and while the doubling of cache levels may yield some performance benefits, the 90nm core technology is more integral to the Intel strategy, as it will allow a core speed ramp up far in excess of the initial 3.2 GHz.

These are the two most obvious enhancements, but Intel has made other core-level changes, including enhancements to the NetBurst architecture. Of course, whether these will be considered "enhancements" depend on your point of view. The main shift has been to extend the Pentium 4 pipeline in order to achieve higher frequencies, thereby offering higher potential performance... at least in the long run. This pipeline extension strategy has been a bone of contention between AMD and Intel, which mirrors the MHz Myth doctrine and may bring back the old IPC (instructions per clock) fracas all over again.

The deeper pipeline can also enact higher latencies, though Intel has made further NetBurst enhancements to mitigate its effect. Intel has also added 13 new SSE3 instructions used for multimedia algorithms, along with 2 new instructions for improving thread synchronization. The branch predictor and hardware prefetch have been tweaked, the Execution Core has been tuned and some latencies reduced, and SSE/SSE2/SSE3 performance has been enhanced. Many of these core enhancements are made with Hyper-Threading in mind, and to allow higher multi-threading performance through decreased hardware contention.

What this really boils down to is a "two steps forward, one step back" scenario, where Intel received noticeable frequency benefits from the 90nm process technology, but seems to have frittered away some of the immediate advantages by doubling the data cache, extending the pipeline, increasing latencies, and working to upgrade HT performance. This may yield serious payoffs in the future, but it also means that in most standard, single-threaded games and applications, the benefit of the core enhancements may not be readily apparent, at least at current Northwood frequencies. On the flip side, the ability to rapidly scale clock speeds up is a real benefit, but one that will not be felt right out of the gate.

[bigZ]

90nm won't happen for AMD until Q4 IMO.

[furious trout]

Thanks Z

the whole pipeline issue is one of the major reasons i'm not particularly struck on Prescott, If i do go for one it'll be when the LGA775 come to market (got burned before by the whole Willamette/Northwood shenanigans :angry: ) So i think i'll probably bide my time till then to make a final decision, but i'm definitely leaning towards the AMD at the moment.

I'm not impressed at Intel's obsession at getting clock speeds up for no apparent performance gain - still that's what shifts products to the general public i suppose.

As a side note i assume there's gonna be a bit of a lag before any w/cooling kit is available for socket 939 or LGA 775 - (Not too fussed about that, the water cooling issue is gonna be a whole new tranche of negotiation with the chancellor of the Trout household :h34r: )

[fillip]

presumably you could just modify the clamping device for any water cooling option.
If the board has mounting holes then it should be relatively easy to fabricate a mounting plate that would secure the CPU block.
An SHD would be a bit harder i guess.

[bigZ]

Yeah, I can see phase change moving right away from intel with LGA775, I can already see the condensation dripping off the SHD...

The LGA775 boards will have mounting holes I guess, and I can't see it being too long before Socket 939 watercooling gear comes out, as I assume it uses the same mounting technique as Socket 754 and Socket 940. Thus there is already blocks on the market I would say :)