Jeremy Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Ronald G Minnich wrote:
>
> > just a note on CPUs...
> >
> > ron
> >
>
> I would love to see some AMD Athlon/Thunderbird specs
> in the mix. These chips use the Alpha EV6's bus licensed
> from DEC/Compaq.
Except Athlons run the bus at either 100Mhz or 133Mhz
instead of the 166Mhz that the Alpha uses.
When you consider that the bus's are running DDR there the alpha
has a significant lead.
The pentium 4 does have an advantage in actual cpu bus bandwidth at
this point.
However except in limited applications this extra bus speed is not
a real advantage on the Pentium 4, which has an extremly expensive
branch penalty. I suspect the Pentium 4 will be a decent cpu after
the first cpu core tweak.
Today the best value are the Athlons with DDR SDRAM. With out paired
DIMMs they get almost as much bandwidth as the Pentium 4 with a more
general purpose core. Plus they cost half as much.
It will be interesting to see how the battle turns out.
Eric
