Replies to post #40801 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[morrowinder]

SGolds:

Frequency is frequency. Frequency is one aspect of performance. You do need the context of architecture, cache size, Front side bus etc. but frequency is what it is. There has been this effort to claim that frequency can be de-valued somehow. This is black and white. A processor runs at a certain frequency. Period. Performance on the other hand is a combination of technologies of which frequency is one. Is intel designing products for high frequency? Yes! But they do clearly offer up performance benchmarks and position for their products. You will never hear someone from intel claim that Celeron is anything other than a value processor...or that it outperforms a Pentium 4 processor.

The huge problem is measureing performance. Not only does this change over time: new compilers, better chipset tuning etc. But performance varies alot. And manufacturers tend to err in their own favor(Apple...some would say AMD). Games run differently than office applications, multitasking is different from the previous two, heavy FP scientific applications differ dramatically from bandwidth heavy server workloads. Trying to capture performance in one number for someone who really appreciates the benchmarks is really absurd. Besides if this were really scientific wouldn't AMDs models numbers look like this: Sempron 2753. So Tenchu is right in my opinion...

[Tenchu]

Sgolds, The average Celeron purchases does not know that the Celeron runs significantly slower than the equivalent P4. Intel has been cynically fooling these folks for years.

That's debatable, depending on whether you focus on the "two-drink minimum" marketing reps or the savvy of the average consumer. Personally, I think most people either know that Celeron is slower at the same clock speed than Pentium, or is told that by the sales rep at Circuit City/Best Buy/Fry's/Costco. (Well OK, maybe not Costco.)

Anyway, Morrowinder says it best. Frequency is frequency, and clock speed is clock speed.

Tenchu