Comparison chart of Intel/AMD cpus?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 02:12:28AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   In the old days, we only had to worry about whether we were buying a
> 486 or a 486SuX ("affectionate nickname").  Now there's a whole slew of
> Intel cpus, and AMD is a serious competitor, which doubles the list.  I
> believe that the AMD Sempron is equivalant to the Intel Celeron.  Beyond
> that, I'm lost.  Is there a comparison chart on the web somewhere?

Well here are the ones I know about:

Pentium-M: A continuation of the P6 core started in the Pentium Pro,
then later P2, P3, and finally the Pentium-M.  Mostly used in laptop's
as part of the centrino chipset, but also some use in embedded
applications.  It tends to use about 1/3 or less power than an
equivalant Pentium 4.  For most tasks it matches a P4 running 50% higher
clock speeds.  Some companies have started trying to offer desktop
motherboards to run this chip.

Pentium-4: The go for clock speed design Intel designed when the P3
wouldn't run any faster.  Highly optimized for executing integer
arithmetic (it can do up to 4 integer instructions per clock cycle), as
well as running SSE[23] code.  It has a very long pipeline (I believe
31 stages in the latest design), which helps it run it very high clock
speeds, but of course it also means a branch prediction miss will
seriously hurt performance (which is why the P4 initially looked very
bad running code that wasn't explicitly optimized for it).  On optimized
code that has long linear passes over lots of code, such as video
encoding and image manipulation (like photoshop) it runs very well.

Celeron: Reduced cache and slower FSB version of the P4 (originally of
the P2/P3 but name reused just like Pentium name is).  Aimed at budget
markets.

Athlon-XP: Probably discontinued by now.  The last version of the K7
design by AMD, topping out at 3200 rating (2.2GHz). Compared very well
with the Pentium-M at similar clock speeds.  Uses about half the power of
a P4.

Duron: Cache size reduced version of Athlon-XP with slower front side
bus (FSB).  Aimed at competing with Celerons.

Athlon-64/Opteron: 64bit chip from AMD with integrated memory controller
(which makes memory accesses faster than going through an intermediate
memory controller in the chipset).  Can run all 32bit software at least
as fast as the Athlon-XP, while 64bit software in general runs even
faster (there are a few odd ball exceptions where the extra memory
accesses needed for the larger pointers outweighs the performance
gains).  Available as socket 939/940 for dual channel memory controller
(940 is for Opteron which requires registered memory used in servers to
allow much larger amount of memory), and socket 754 (single channel
memory controller).  Rating of a socket 754 will be lower than a socket
939 at the same clock speed due to reduced memory bandwidth.  In 64bit
mode, MMX and the x87 FPU are disabled since they were inefficient
terrible designs, and only the new register based FPU of the SSE*
instructions are available which provide much better FPU performance
than any x87 design ever had (which was stack based).  The P4 also
doesn't like x87 instructions and prefers SSE instructions for any FPU
work.

Sempron: Athlon-64 with reduced cache size, and 64bit support turned
off.  AMD's current budget line to compete with the Celeron line from
Intel.  Available both as Athlon-XP socket compatible (which were
re-branded Durons) and as socket 754 (single memory channel Athlon-64
socket).

AMD Geode, VIA Eden, etc: Various low power chips aimed at the embedded
systems market.  Geode NX is actually an Athlon-XP at reduced voltage
and clock rates, but needs a board designed to provide the low voltage
to run.

Lennart Sorensen
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