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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=912
AMD Adopts its own "Megahertz Myth" Campaign
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
September 9th 2002
AMD plans to push its Athlons by indicating which Pentiums its chips can beat.
The megahertz marketing ploy is well known: clock speed is everything. But AMD is
about to change all that.
AMD plans to label all of its processors with rating indicating which Intel processors
they can dust, according to a story filed at the Washington Post.
For example, AMD argues that an Athlon 2600MHz CPU should outperform any 2.8GHz P4
machine handily. AMD''s marketing thrust is designed to demonstrate that architecture
is much more important than raw clock speed.
However, even AMD has succumbed to the pressures induced by the ''megahertz myth'':
the company''s own 1500 and 2200+ Athlons run at lower clock speeds than their names
suggest - 1.3 and 1.8GHz, respectively, in fact.
While the most demanding games continue to tax Intel, AMD and Motorola processors and
graphics cards, the Post article quotes a number of industry commentators, who argue
that even the slowest CPUs on the market run word processors, browsers and
photo-editing software more than adequately.
DVD movie making is one area where a fast processor, used for compressing digital
video, is essential. Apple has a base 700MHz single-processor eMac which does this,
although any 400 or 450MHz G4 equipped with a DVD-R drive can do this. The Post points
out that such capabilities are meaningless to most fast PCs, which don''t even have a
FireWire port for hooking up to a DV cam, and are rarely equipped with a DVD-R/+RW
drive.
IBM also points out that its ViaVoice software is not particularly
processor-intensive, demanding only a 300MHz CPU as a minimum requirement. A better
microphone and RAM will do more for ViaVoice than outright CPU power - and both are
much cheaper upgrades than a new processor.
Analysis: If AMD help educate the average consumer, all the better. But even Apple''s
new DP G4s don''t take full advantage of the bandwidth offered by DDR, as a result of
the limitations imposed by the current PM G4s'' architecture.
But is the MHz gulf between Apple and x86 getting too wide for even Apple''s marketing
to bridge? If clock speed were all people looked at, Apple wouldn''t be unloading
hundreds of thousands of iBooks per annum, given that the iBook is still the only Mac
to run a G3, now by far the slowest chip in the model line-up.
Certainly, pros need all the speed they can get to run Photoshop, Final Cut or
Cleaner. But aside from games, what types of CPU-intensive tasks do you use a PC for?
If you use a PC or Mac at work, let us know what sort of intensive, high-power
computational work you need a superfast machine for.
Post your comments at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=912
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Copyright (c) 2002 Insanely Great Mac. All rights reserved. This article
may not be republished in part or whole without explicit written
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