Just a simple example of P4 vs. Athlon XP. I chose older chips simply
because they are cheap and the benchmarks were easy to find. If I knew
which P4 was being considered, I could provide more relevant
benchmarks. Also, keep in mind that the prices of these chips have
decreased significantly since this article was written (2002).
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000289
"Knowing that a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 costs $562 and that an Athlon XP
2000+ (on average slightly faster) comes with a $339 pricetag, it is
crystal clear that the Athlon is still the king in the
price/performance department."
Here's an article with some possibly more useful benchmarks:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=914&page=4
The cheapest you can currently get this P4 (based on search of
pricegrabber.com) is $110 US. The cheapest you can get the Athlon is
$60 US. Therefore, you get the following price/performance ratios
based on the last review:
CPU Bench
Athlon: 77.25 MIPS/$ P4: 35.48 MIPS/$ (Dhrystone)
Athlon: 38.68 MFLOPS/$ P4: 9.59/22.5 MFLOPS/$ (Whetstone)
Multimedia Bench
Athlon: 151.68 it/s/$ P4: 72.57 it/s/$ (Int)
Athlon: 177.88 it/s/$ P4: 89.02 it/s/$ (Float)
Memory Bench
Athlon: 33.57 MB/s/$ P4: 9.57 MB/s/$ (Int)
Athlon: 31.72 MB/s/$ P4:9.56 MB/s/$ (float)
That's an average of 2.85 performance/price increase of this AMD chip
over the P4!!
Now obviously if we get more expensive processors we might have lower
or higher benchmarks/$ depending on how far up the line we go. I would
be more than willing to look into which processor would provide us the
best performance/price if people are interested.
Can you
provide actual benchmark results and a price/performance comparison?
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)