AMD blames Intel for PR Ratings

[ayoub_ibrahim]

Responding to a question whether AMD would now be accused of confusing end users, a representative at the Milano press conference said poor performance from Intel Pentium 4 processors but fast clock speeds had forced his company to introduce the PR rating, because consumers would otherwise be dazzled by just the megahertz rating.

full article here

[ALBPM]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mean old Intel made us do it

Paul

[impact]

Hehe... the P4 MHz rating would confuse people, so AMD will just create another even more confusing rating system. Very funny indeed.

What's even funnier is that they aren't really trying to standartize anything, they just want their chip names to have bigger numbers than the P4s...

[Greebe]

The average consumer is so dumb.. here's one I liked...

Just got me a P2 900 system!

Huh?! They never made a P2 at 900 speed... it must be OC'd but even then those cpu's could never have been OC's that high! Let me look

Well that's what I was told!

Hmmm... (that's a slent Bwahahahahahaa for those who know better) what you actually have is a dual P2 450 system.

Well isn't that the same effectively?

Nope, not with Win98 installed!

[Joel]

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is upgrading its line of desktop computer processors with faster chips, familiar names and revised performance measurements.

The chip-maker launched four processors Tuesday - all under the name Athlon XP. AMD says "XP" stands for "extra performance," not "experience" as in Microsoft's upcoming Windows XP operating system.

"It's clever marketing on their part to hitch a product to what they think will be a rising star," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at the research firm Insight 64. "Any fast processor can do an adequate job running Windows XP."

Athlon XP chips run at speeds ranging from 1.33 gigahertz to 1.53 GHz, which is still below the highest clock speed of rival Intel Corp.'s Pentium 4 processor, which now tops out at 2 GHz.

AMD, however, says a processor's frequency is not the best measure of performance, and that its chips outperform Intel in tests of commonly used programs.

AMD will market the chips based on performance rather than clock speed. The 1.5 GHz Athlon XP will be sold as the Athlon 1800+. The 1.33 GHz is called the Athlon XP 1500+.

The new chips also incorporate several architectural enhancements and consume about 20 percent less power, the company said.

AMD also plans to introduce a performance measurement system that will be rolled out next year. Details of that initiative were expected to be released Tuesday.

The new Athlon XP chips range in price from $130 for the 1500+ to $252 for the 1800+, when purchased in quantities of 1,000.

Joel

[Elie]

Folks check this out

http://www.saveitondvd.com/processor.html

what do you say

Cheers,
Elie

[Wombat]

One thing that bothers me is that AMD has changed their certification policy. Motherboards will not be AMD certified if they display the CPU frequency at boot.

[KvHagedorn]

If Joe sixpack can understand the difference between RPM and BHP, why can he not comprehend the difference between GHz and GFLOPS? the relationship is essentially the same, yet car guys look at horsepower first and revs second.

There needs to be an impartial international standards commitee that Intel cannot bribe that sets up unbiased benchmarks to determine the true speed of a processor. (Sorry, beloved Intellers, but Intel's business practices are such that the company makes Tricky Dick or Slick Willy look like Mother Teresa.) MIPS and MFLOPS are then a real, concrete, understandable standard of measure by which all CPUs should be judged. Even I don't know how the hell they determine what a PR1800 means. Most likely, people will assume it means "Pentium Rating" rather than "Performance Rating" and thereby AMD shoots itself in the foot by proclaiming Intel as the standard setter.

Telling people how many operations the CPU performs per second is blindingly easy for people to understand! This should have been the standard for years now!

[DentyCracker]

I love AMD. I love what they've done for processor prices. I hate stupid PR ratings. Not certifying mobos because they display the MHz? Come on. Anyway it is a simple matter for manufacturers to simply give us a choice of bioses, one which shows the MHz, and another with the PR bullshit. I know which one I'd want, and I am not a pig

[High_Jumbllama]

Good idea!

Ship the motherboards with the one that does not show and have the versions for download show the actual megahertz.

[Marshmallowman]

CPUID?

[KRSESQ]

For your intellectual amusement:

http://bbspot.com/News/2001/09/giggahertz.html

Somewhat prophetic, in an oddball way.

Kevin

P.S. Cyrix tried the "PR" speed rating too, a while back. They were marginally successful, for a while.

[TdB]

yeah, but everybody i know, who owned a cyrix cpu, got very disaapointed, very quickly.
a cyrix cpu rated at 300 couldn´t do 25 fps in quake2 (my pentium 200 could do 45+ fps), this is not a problem for amd, however their rating is based on the performance of the p4 nothwood, and if their 1900 rated cpu performs worse than a 1900ghz p4 northwood, it will backfire on amd.

[ALBPM]

No, it's not based on the Northwood. It's based on the current 0.18 micron P4.

When the Northwood is released later this year AMD will be screwed all over again.....LOL

Paul

[Indiana]

Originally posted by ALBPM
No, it's not based on the Northwood. It's based on the current 0.18 micron P4.

When the Northwood is released later this year AMD will be screwed all over again.....LOL

Paul

I don't think so. While the Northwood will maybe 5 - 10% faster than the current P4, those AMD tests have been done on the old chipsets. Now tests with VIAs KT266a and presumably the upcoming NForce show a 5 - 20+% performance increase due to the higher mem-bandwidth (which was what helped the P4 a bit 'till now). And then I'm sure we will see 166/332MHz FSB Athlons SOON

Of course IF there were >3GHz P4s in the nearer future, then AMD would have a problem, PR or not...