To wait for the Athlon 64 or not to wait for the Athlon 64?

[Technoid]

Originally posted by UtwigMU
IMO When Athlon64 comes out, it will not perform much better than high end AthlonsXP or Pentiums4.

Purely depends on what speeds they are on, A64's have a larger IPC than Athlons and much much larger IPC than P4's

Just compare a P4 1,6GH with a XP 1900+ (1,6gh) and you will see that the XP blows the P4 out of the water

[UtwigMU]

Well at about the same price point as vanilla Athlons.

I think, they'll have better price performance than P4s.

[Admiral]

X-bit Labs did a review of a Opteron 144 (1.8 GHz) and Asus nForce 3 mobo.

[Kurt]

and they're not the first ones...A64 gives mixed results so far...they need to up the MHz and RAM speed.

[Fluff]

Seems to me for sigle CPU get a P4 forget about A64, or just get an XP.
Dual and Quad get an Opteron. but $$$

Can't see them ramping to 3ghz any time soon.

[HedsSpaz]

Some of you are making a few mistakes here in your comparisons. First, the Opteron is NOT the same as the Athlon 64. The Opteron is the server optimized version of the 64bit Athlon architecture. Second, one of the big advantages to the A64 (which admittedly does not have to be specific to 64bit architectures), is that it has 8 extra registers over the P4 and XP both.

Now, the fact of the matter is that applications written to take advantage of a 64bit architecture will see significant improvements in performance. However, as we all know, it will be some time before many applications have that support. By the same token, there is one industry that consistently pushes the cutting edge and is always very close to the edge of any new hardware. That industry is gaming. Typically they run less than 2 quarters behind new features. In this particular circumstance I am willing to bet that many gaming companys will release 64bit compiled versions (if not 64 bit optimized) of their most popular games within a month of the official release date.

I think the true difficulty with all our guess work is that the only benchmarks we have to work with at the moment are the first generation Opteron benches. The A64 will be on a smaller die process, it will have several more highly tuned chipsets than are currently available for the Opteron, and it will debut at higher clock speeds.

As to the alternatives that have been suggested, there are some of us who for whatever reason do not want to buy Intel, do not want to buy nvidia, and do not want to buy Via (who does want to buy Via?).

One final observation on MHz/GHz clock speeds. We have been through several cycles in the CPU industry where we have seen raw speed matter more and less. Right now we are at a point where raw speed matters less than any other time we have seen in the past. The Athlon XP 3200+ does not run at 3.2ghz as we all know, yet it basically keeps par with a 3.2ghz P4. So lets not have an undue amount of importance placed on raw speed. It still matters certainly, but all details should be taken into consideration. Remember, this is the MURC, image quality matters here . Lets keep that same mentality when comparing all products, don't get stuck on the almighty polygon or the almighty MHz.

Ian