There's a lot going on today. Intel and AMD are both officially releasing new CPUs today. Intel is releasing their new design P4 (codename "Northwood") at 2 and 2.2 Ghz. AMD is releasing Athlon XP 2000+ (1667 Mhz). Normally I'd only mention new CPU releases in passing, but these releases today are more significant.
The Athlon XP 2000+ is simply a 67 Mhz clockspeed boost over the 1900+ model. It also happens to be the fastest CPU that most Socket A boards can support without a bios upgrade. (It uses a 12.5 multiplier.) Performance improvement is what you'd expect, not a whole lot over the 1900+.
Intel's releases today are a lot more exciting. Compared to the current P4 design ("Willamette"), the new Northwood design has 256kb more L2 cache AND is built on a .13 micron process. The switch to .13 micron (which is the minimum gate length of the transistors itself) allows higher clockspeeds, reduces the amount of silicon used, and reduces power consumption. This means that Intel could potentially reduce prices on P4s. (The estimated manufacturing cost of a Northwood P4 is $55 US.) The additional cache ram also boosts the performance of the P4 by about 5 - 10% at the same clockspeed.
When comparing the performance of the new Northwood P4 2.2 Ghz and the new Athlon XP 2000+ it becomes much more difficult to pick a clear winner in performance. Unfortunately Intel didn't make any changes the the FPU (floating point unit), which handles complex math calculations, in the Northwood. This means that the Athlon continues to hold a significant performance advantage in math intensive applications. Even when optimized for the P4 with SSE 2 instructions, the P4 has a hard time matching the Athlon XP. The extra cache ram has however significantly boosted the performance of the P4 in many areas where the Athlon was able to edge out a narrow victory. When comparing the Athlon XP 1900+ with the "old" 2 Ghz P4, the Athlon was the clear winner in nearly all benchmarks, often by a significant margin. Now the line is fuzzier. That means choosing the proper CPU for your next computer in the next few months is not as easy as it once was.
Applications with a significant P4 lead over Athlon XP:
Quake 3 (low resolutions)
Most Open GL games
Sysmark 2001 (internet apps)
Lightwaves (ray tracing)
Applications where P4 and Athlon XP are nearly equal:
Sysmark 2001 (office apps)
Quake 3 (high resolution)
3dMark 2001
Direct X 8 games
Applications where Athlon XP holds a significant edge over Northwood P4:
3dmark 2000
Science Mark
Direct X 7 games
Adobe Photoshop (even with special P4 patch)
3dStudio Max
You also should consider that the Athlon XP supports dual processor operation. This makes it much better suited as a professional workstation than the P4 with it's powerful FPU. The P4 seems to be better for OpenGL games. It's also worth noting that the Athlon XP 2000+ will cost around $325 and the 2.2 Ghz P4 will be $600 AND only achieves top performance when using Rambus PC800 RAM, which costs about 25% more than the DDR ram that the Athlon uses. The "bang for the buck" ratio is strongly favoring the Athlon XP.
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Future trends for first half of 2002:
Intel will continue to up P4 clockspeed. Evaluation P4 CPUs (which are not locked) are overclocking easily to 2.8 - 3 Ghz. Unfortunately retail CPUs, the ones you and I buy, are locked. Some people have been able to overclock them though to 2.5 Ghz. This is good news because it is likely Intel will stick with Socket 478 for it's new P4s for at least the next 6 months. That means that people who have P4 motherboards with Socket 478 will have CPU upgrade options available. It's important to note that the older P4s were also available in a socket 423 version, which is no longer supported. That means that if you already have a P4 system that you bought more than a month ago, you WILL NOT be able to upgrade the CPU above the current 2 Ghz P4. (I.e. not the new design.)
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPUs are also overclocking well, with some examples hitting 2 Ghz. That means that AMD will be able to match the performance of the P4 for the next couple months. With a bios flash, most current Athlon (and all Athlon XP) users will be able to use these CPUs. At the end of the first quarter of this year AMD will also be "shrinking" the current Athlon XP design to .13 micron BUT using a more advanced SOI (silicon on insulator) process that should allow much higher clockspeeds. It appears these CPUs will also fit into Socket A, but certainly a bios flash will be required to use them.
Nvidia is set to announce a new graphics core on February 4th or 5th. It's unknown what it will be called, but it will probably be GeForce 4. Expect ATI to respond with by boosting performance of the current Radeon cards with clockspeed boosts, and a new model in March or April.
Intel will also be releasing a mobile P4 chip for laptops, an area where the current P4 cannot be used.
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Future trends for 2nd half 2002:
AMD will release it's successor to the Athlon (codename "Hammer" or K8). This CPU is going to be revolutionary in many ways. It will include the memory controller on the CPU itself, which should greatly improve performance over current CPUs by reducing the amount of time the CPU has to wait for data from memory. It will also reduce the costs of motherboards, as they will no longer have to implement the memory controller on the motherboard. The K8 largely reuses the extremely powerful FPU (floating point unit) of the K7 (Athlon), but the rest of the processor is beefed up. It also extends the x86 instruction set to 64 bit, making this CPU able to run all current software AND also uniquely suited for mid-level professional workstation use. (This will allow AMD to compete directly with Intel's Itanium and Sun's Blade UltraSPARC workstations and be capable of being used as a regular desktop processor as well.) This processor, although running at over 2 Ghz already in samples, will not compete clock for clock with the P4. It doesn't have to, like the current Athlon it gets more done per clock than the P4. This largely explains why AMD is trying to get away from advertising the true clockspeed of their CPUs. I wouldn't expect to see this CPU before September. (It is certain that this CPU will NOT work on current Socket A boards.)
Intel will release a new version of it's workstation processor, the Itanium (codename McKinnley). I'd also expect Intel to transistion the P4 to DDR SDRAM platforms, away from the more expensive RAMBUS RDRAM.
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Some reviews are starting to pop up comparing the two CPUs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/p42200-19.html http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1574&p=1 (They seem to have come to the same conclusions as I did.)
[ 01-07-2002: Message edited by: bloom25 ]
