Replies to post #3225 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Dan3]

Re: A slight redesign of Banias for a desktop CPU could reveal a serious contender to the speed crown

Banias is a new PIII core stepping, with a wider, faster FSB, SSE2, 1 meg of cache, and substantially improved power management.

It's a good chip (the PIII was a superbly balanced core) but the PIII core has had trouble keeping up with the Athlon core, in the past.

OTOH, Intel has been purposely crippling PIII since P4 came out (slow FSB, etc.) to make P4 look better, so a PIII "unchained" might do very well.

[kpf]

fyodor: 8-way L2-cache?

Could you pls explain what that is? Or even better, what is the difference to the way AMD-CPUs run the cache? TIA.

K.

[wbmw]

Fyo, I don't see Banias as a contender for the desktop performance crown, at least not with the current features. Add Hyperthreading, an 800MHz FSB, and dual channel DDR memory, and then you might have a different story. Of course, once you do that, the CPU is not low power any more.

There is also the issue of frequency scaling. Pentium 4 will always hit higher frequencies than a Banias core, and in some applications, that will always offer an advantage.

I think the one place where Banias will have the performance crown is in mobile applications. In order to compete here, Intel must scale back the Pentium 4 so that it is lower power. You will not see 800MHz FSB parts. You will not see the same frequencies on desktop at mobile power levels. You probably won't see Hyperthreading until later, either.

So Banias will outperform Pentium 4 here, because it's better suited for low power. It does not need to be scaled back quite as much to deliver the same power levels.