processors

By far the biggest myth in the consumer PC market is that everyone needs a faster processor. Well the truth is people were doing word processing, surfing the web, and sending email fine when processors only reach 1ghz, so if WPIE is all you want to use your PC for then why would you need a top of the line system?

Also there is a drastic price increase between top notch processors, and those maybe only 80% as good. This price increase can often be as much as 2-300%, making it hard to justify the cost for only a small increase in performance. If you are presented with a choice of 3 or 4 processors your best solution will be to pick the slowest processor available. You will save money, and you will have all the speed you need. All in all any processor above 1.5mhz should be more than adequate for typical home use of WPIE.

Processor Brands

Intel

Intel is the best known processor manufacturer but they aren't necessarily the best. Intel knows that big numbers are impressive so they have focused on developing faster processors as opposed to better processors. Intel's processors perform well in streaming multimedia type applications, but they do not perform quite as well in office or productivity type applications.

Under the Intel name there are 2 main consumer lines: the Pentium, and the Celeron. The major difference between these two is the fact that the Celeron's contain less internal cache. Internal cache is like temporary storage within the processor itself, it gives the processor a shorter time between command executions. If you were using your computer just for WPIE a Celeron should be enough for your uses. You would want the Pentium if you wanted to do more multimedia type work or if you wanted to play games.

AMD

AMD is a lesser known brand, but they are a better choice for the typical WPIE user because AMD performs better for productivity or office based applications like word processing, web browsing, and email. AMDs are also typically cheaper than Intels.

One thing that often confuses people is how AMD names their products. AMD's chips are not as fast as Intel's, but they are more efficient. So instead of calling their processor an "Athlon 1.7ghz" like Intel does, AMD names them like "Athlon 2400" unofficially that means that the chip performs like an Intel 2.4ghz, even if it only runs at 2ghz or slower. So while AMDs are technically slower, they can outperform Intel's at higher speeds.

Pentium 4 / Athlon

The Pentium 4's advantages

The Pentium 4 has been endowed by Intel with a number of natural advantages, not least of which is its incredible ability to ramp clock frequencies and, hand-in-hand with it, a hair-raising 1.5GHz top clock speed. Impressive as the GHz numbers are, though, the real story with the P4 is its ability to move data around inside the system. From the front-side bus to its RDRAM memory interface to its north-south bridge link, the P4 has a considerable advantage over the Athlon platform, at least on paper.

Let me slow down and run some of the numbers by you. The P4 has a 100MHz, "quad-pumped" front-side bus between itself and the rest of the system. To confuse you, we will, as always, refer to this bus interchangeably as 100MHz and 400MHz—whatever suits our purposes. This 400MHz monster can pump through up to 3.2GB of data per second. Coupled nicely with that bus are the P4's dual channels of PC800 Rambus DRAM, which can also push through 3.2GB of data per second at peak. Further down, in the less-exotic bowels of the system, the Intel 850 chipset has a 266MHz "hub"-style link between its north and south bridge chips. (Though Intel doesn't use directional terminology, the chips' purposes are basically the same as in most other contemporary PCs.)

In every one of these cases, the P4 has a system bandwidth advantage over the Athlon. If nothing else, the Pentium 4 platform has plenty of room to grow. And it ought to deliver a serious whuppin' at memory-intensive tasks.

The Athlon's advantages

Meanwhile, the Athlon's great advantage over the Pentium 4 is, well, the Athlon chip itself. AMD has created a wondrous thing in this processor, a marvel of x86-compatible design. Athlons have already easily outpaced the PIII in the megahertz race, and they're at least as fast, clock for clock, as any PIII chip. The Pentium 4 may run at higher clock speeds, but it does so by virtue of a very long instruction pipeline. The length of that pipeline hampers the P4's clock-for-clock performance, so that a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 isn't necessarily any faster than, say, a 1GHz Pentium III.

But then many things aren't as they seem once the theoretical performance numbers start flying around. For instance, the Pentium 4 talks to its L2 cache over a 256-bit wide connection, while the Athlon's L2 cache interface is only 64-bits wide. However, the Athlon Thunderbird's dual-ported, on-chip cache is probably just as good as the P4's.

But I digress. The advantages for the Athlon here include excellent clock-for-clock performance, especially in floating-point math, where the P4 is relatively weak and the Athlon is quite strong.

To bolster the Athlon's already strong performance, AMD has introduced a pair of platform enhancements. There's a new front-side bus speed of 266MHz, up from 200MHz. And there's the 760 chipset's ability to address double date rate (DDR) SDRAM. Created to combat the high prices (and latencies) of RDRAM, the DDR vs. Rambus struggle is a running subtext of the AMD-Intel conflict. The 133MHz variety of DDR memory, dubbed PC2100, can push through 2.1GB/sec, at peak—not as much as the P4's dual RDRAM channels, but twice the speed of conventional PC133 SDRAM.

In short, even though the Athlon is running at a clock rate 300MHz lower than the P4's, we're expecting big things out of this 1.2GHz DDR test rig.