Do I buy Athlon 64 or Pentium 4?

[msclee]

I am thinking of a new PC. Thats good.

It has to be usuable by me and my other half :cry: Thats bad.

so I set up a dual boot . Thats good.

BUT - it will be in use for about 4 years. Thats bad.

So boys and girls do I go Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 (or other)?

You decide............

Well assist in decision making anyway.......

Cheers

M

[kamina]

Easy decision

[DrF]

I'd go for the P4 or why not an Athlon XP3200. There is very little software written to optomize 64bit processors and by the time there is they will hopefully have come down in price.

[robbiusa]

Easy decision

You seem to keep abreast of the technology side of things pretty well and always seem to make sense.... with both Intel and AMD going through a transition period, which would you say offers the best upgrade path considering how much the tech for hardware will change in the next 4 years (what is Dothan and why should I care, 754 vs. 939, DDR2, BTX vs. ATX, PCI express, et al... driving me nuts :shock: )

6 months ago I went with the P4... today I would probably go Athlon 64.

[kamina]

Firstly, I'd say the biggest bonus in the A64 processors right now is not the 64bit support, rather the memory controller that is built into the processor. Just to understand I made a drawing in paint!



Probably the biggest innovation in the A64 is that it does'nt have a northbridge in the traditional sence anymore. The memory controller that has traditionally been in the northbrige has moved into the processor and so data can just move back and forth between them. This has caused memory latency to fall dramatically.

I do expect quite a boost in some programs when the 64bit windows is ready. It still does'nt change the fact that the processor performs very well allready under our current operatingsystems. The biggest boost with win64 (or whatever it will be called) will not come just from the fact that it's 64bit. This will allow access to larger amounts of ram which won't really make a diferance for me. (yet) The processor has some other advantages from the transition though. There is extra registers in it that are not used before transition to win64 and is what will cause most of the performance increase.

I also prefere my computer to be silent. The A64 runs alot cooler then the P4's. (northwood or prescott) This test is not especially well done, as they have'nt enabled powersaving features on the athlon xp's, and it seems they are not using all the powersaving features on the A64 either. I think looking at the max reached temps will give a fairly good view on how hot processors are really running.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=2026

As to the future of the processors.

Currently A64's are offerec for socket 754 and socket 940. Socket 754 will continue to have processors made for it, but after the next upgrade the rest will all be 32bit processors. The future athlon xp's will actually be A64's without support for 64bit. This will mean that they are practicly like the A64's we have now as there is no os to support the 64 bit yet.

Socket 940 will continue to be used in servers, meaning it has a long life ahead of it.

In about a month amd will release socket 939 which is the same as the current 754 but supports dual channel ram. Basicly it's like 940 now but on 939 the ram can be unregistered. (the common stuff we all use) Socket 939 will continue for a long time, but will be fairly expensive in the beginning.

I don't really believe socket 939 will even make such a huge diferance in the beginning. It might give you an averige performance boost of up to 10%, but considering the price will initially be high, it might not be worth it. The A64 does'nt care as much for high memory bandwidth, even though it does ofcourse help.

Intel is changing their current processor socket very soon. I think it's fair to assume that they won't really be releasing any more processors on the current one. (atleast they wish they would'nt) The change was allready supposed to happen, but the hardware world is hesitating. On the new motherboard we will have ddr2, pci-express ect. It all sounds nice on paper, but in reality ddr2 will be very expensive, and won't perform better then current ram untill about next spring.

Basicly the options are the following:

1. Get an A64 (socket 754) and if you notice there is a big performance boost once win64 comes out then you can upgrade to it. (but can't really upgrade the processor anymore)

2. Get an A64 (socket 754) and don't upgrade the operating system. You will then have plenty of processor upgrades available in the future.

3. Get a P4 and you won't be able to upgrade the processor at all.

4. Wait for A64 (socket 939) and hope the prices won't be so high that you'll end up waiting for another 6 months.

[robbiusa]

Thanks kamina... you really have done your homework!

[kamina]

Dothan is a pretty cool looking processor though. It's basicly a pentium -m with double the L2 cache (2mb) and higher clockspeeds. It's still just a temporary thing untill the end of the year.

It should work as a direct upgrade for computers with the pentium -m processor.

[toby.one]

Socket 940 will continue to be used in servers, meaning it has a long life ahead of it.

.

but you dont recommend this in your choices kamina. is it a viable alternative?
cheers

[CHUBBS]

I've just recently put together an Athlon64 3200+ Rig. I've used an Asus K8V deluxe wireless edition motherboard, 512mb of Geil PC3200 RAM, 120GB WD drive with 8mb of cache along with zalman PSU and CPU cooler. The audio card I chose was M-Audio 1010-LT. I must say this setup has been amazing. Apart from great performance and latencies below 1ms, its been super stable. I use Sonar 3 along with a whole bunch of synths and I can achieve latency below 1ms without any trouble. No pops or clicks anywhere on the horizon. Not even worried about the 64bit extensions. Windows 64 will come around late this year, but this machine performs amazing without the 64bit extensions enabled. I honestly believe that this is the best setup one can hope for. Its powerful and stable. Should be great down the road. I'll up the RAM on the next pay packet and that will it for me.
I strongly recommend it to everyone who's in the market for a DAW.
Cheers

[kamina]

Socket 940 will continue to be used in servers, meaning it has a long life ahead of it.

.

but you dont recommend this in your choices kamina. is it a viable alternative?
cheers

Actually socket 940 just became a very tempting option. Amd just announced that they will be releasing dual core cpu's next year. What this means is that single cpu motherboards could be used as a dual cpu setup. This idea has been cooking for some time in both intel's and amd's camp but the functionality is allready built into socket 940 motherboards.

It seems that intel will do this with the pentium -m processor for both laptops and desktop computers. They can't do it with pentium 4's because they are running so hot, no cooler could really keep a dual core pentium 4 cool enough. This is not really a problem, as Intel is scraping the pentium 4 architechture and moving to pentium -m. They will not release "tejas" the supposed follow up to the current pentium 4 prescott.

Socket 754 motherboards will not support dual core cpu's, but the forthcoming socket 939 motherboards should.