how do you read AMD Athlon speeds?

[drindahowse]

well im kind of confused. I know that you read Pentium 4 speeds like 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, 3.2GHz, 3.4GHz and so on....

But with AMD Athlon you read it as 2200+, 2800+, 3200+, 3400+, and so on....

so my question is how do you compare the same speed to each other, for example:
what does 3200+ equal in Pentium terms?
does 3200+ equal 3.2GHz??

someone please answer!

 

[003]

most of the time, yes. however it also depends on the core. for example, the 3700+ san diego is better than the 3800+ venice.

 

[Megadeth2]

Pretty much that is how its done. Oh you should know that 2800+ is rated to perform better than a 2.8 GHz P4, not equally. That goes for all Athlon 64s. The Athlon XPs is a different story, since the architecture is older it doesn't hold up well against the new P4s as it used to and they are being fazed out of the market anyway. So, stick with the Athlon 64 and yes, the corresponding rating shows that it will perform than the corresponding Intel part at that speed in that same market sector (value, performance, extreme).

 

[gaara]

Please search, this has been covered numerous times.

AMD clock cylcles can process more instructions than Intel clock cycles and gradual grow more and more effective with each generation. Therefore an AMD processor can use a smaller frequency than Intel yet still process the same amount at the same speed.

To put it simply this is because AMD uses shorter pipelines, which provides performance in "horsepower" applications, or more specifically, games. AMD can send more data out faster with each clock cycle, but not as much.

Intel on the other hand uses long pipelines. They excel in rendering, encoding, and other extensive CPU intensive applications. Intel takes a lot of data at once and processes it over an extended period of time, or takes more clock cycles.

The AMD naming scheme was introduced to give users a comparison between their chips, and those of Intel. In theory an Athlon 3200+ is the competitor of the 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4, however due to their differences in architechture as mentioned above each excel in a variety of fields.

 

[Hacp]

Amd started their naming scheme starting with the pIIs .