What's the advantage of AMD over Pentium?

[Mier]

I've read tons of posts and numerous threads and articles on the subject and I have yet to actually understand what anyone is talking about.

I have always been a Pentium person but want to make the jump to AMD. Now logic tells me that a P4 3.8 would be faster than an AMD 3800+ that runs at 2.0, but then again we are talking about computers so logic pretty much gets thrown right out the window.

Someone take this bag of snakes and lay them out straight for me. What exactly is it that would make the AMD chip run games faster?

 

[SHAWN]

AMD 3800 = P4 3.8ghz. Ghz mean nothing.

 

[gaara]

Easy to explain but much more difficult to get a visual picture of and try and understand but I will try

Clock frequency is simply the measurement of how quickly a processor can perform an operation, and an operation within a processor is the process of carrying an instruction set down a pipeline from point A to point B meeting a number of stages while travelling down that pipeline that allow the processor to use the instruction set

Therefore, one can define 1Hz as the time it takes x to travel from A to B. Now, assume you have a Pentium 4 Prescott and an AMD64, both use pipelines to process instruction sets. I believe the AMD64 has 12 pipeline stages versus the prescott that has 30 stages but don't quote me on those numbers...it is evident the Pentium has much longer pipelines than the Athlon

If you were to look back at the basic formula, you would see that 1Hz on an AMD would not be equal to 1Hz on an Intel considering the pipeline length...the AMD is able to execute the instruction set much faster than the Intel therefore it requires less number of Hz to perform similar tasks

 

[SHAWN]

Well explained gaara

 

[Elbatrop1]

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85642&highlight=why+is+amd+faster+than+intel+clock

That should help to answer questions.

EDIT:

I just noticed gaara's explanation after my original post here

Yes, Athlon64s have 12 pipelines. Yonahs have between 12 and 14, and Conroes have 14. FYI, PIIIs have 10.

 

[MrZucchiniHead]

**** if you would of asked this yester day i was reading a post on some other forums about AMD and intel, it provided a visual discription of what gaara said with the pipelines and such and a very long in depth description, it was like 2 pages of posts that told the difference.

ill try and google it up for ya.

 

[Mier]

Thanks for the explanation guys especially gaara for the long in depth bit. I think I get it now. So basically the Athlon 64 x2 3800 that I am buying will do good for gaming for me.

 

[john3]

Simply put, AMD rocks Intel in every aspect of computing thanx to their Dual core CPUs. And AMD is WAYYYY Cheaper.

 

[macdude425]

No, not anymore. Since the introduction of the Yonah, they have a bit of an advantage over AMD in the portable market. Not to mention, the Pentium M is still insanely great.

 

[Elbatrop1]

No, not anymore. Since the introduction of the Yonah, they have a bit of an advantage over AMD in the portable market. Not to mention, the Pentium M is still insanely great.

IMO, since they have had the Dothan core Intel has dominated performance-wise in the mobile market. Mind you Yonah core isn't far off of Dothan.