I have been using a laptop computer of Pentium III 1.13 Ghz. I heard that AMD's Athlon has excellent floating point capacity. So I bought a Athlon 2200+ laptop yesterday. I expected that new Athlon 2200+ will be twice as fast as the P III 1.13 GB. I ran a R simulation program and the new computer is only 30% faster, in fact slightly slower than a Celeron 1.50 GB laptop. I am very disappointed by this. What is your experience with Athlon? Should I stick to Intel in the future? Thanks.
I've found a big problem with laptops to be slow hard drive speeds; if you're doing any disk read/writes, it's noticably slower. I believe the slower HDs use less battery power, so it makes some design sense to stick with slower drives.
For workstations (not laptops) I use Athlon processors whenever possible, and pick HDs that run at a minimum ca. 9000 RPM. I've found the Athlons to give very satisfying grunt per dollar, but you need to have fast RAM, fast HDs, and decent-sized cache to actually realise the full benefits.
Cheers
Jason -- Indigo Industrial Controls Ltd. 64-21-343-545 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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