Athlon XP--back to the PR rating

Kakarot · Post by **Kakarot** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 10:56 am

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/22046.html

Man, I hated this PR rating crap back in the day when Cyrix and AMD starting doing it with their Pentium class cpu's. I thought we were passed all this, but apparently AMD is playing Intel's game of Mhz is everything and trying to offset the Mhz advantage the P4 has(read: Mhz advantage, not performance advantage).

Why can't they just find a way of educating the general customer instead of bowing down to his/her stupidity or ignorance? I think its more ignorance than stupidity. There are a lot of smart people out there that are just NOT in the know when it comes to this stuff. I think the key here is to find a way of reaching the average joe and saying "Hey! wake up, this is the way it is... not like this, the you are thinking now!" They need to find some standard benchmark or rating system(besides MHZ) that they can run these CPU's on and say look, our cpu's perform at this level and their's perform at this level. So as you can see our's performs better and is cheaper. And they need to drop this myth of MHZ is everything. Once they do that then I think that will free up ALL Microprocessor making companies to innovate and create perfomance enhancing technologies instead of just higher MHZ. /rant

PreDatoR · Post by **PreDatoR** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 11:17 am

Why don't AMD get out a 2.0 gig chip then... You know it would blow the doors off of anything that Intel can come up with.... Why do this gay ass PR rating shit... If i buy a chip that says 1800 i want the sucker to run 1800 not 1533....

Jim Z · Post by **Jim Z** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 11:26 am

Why don't AMD get out a 2.0 gig chip then...

because their magic CPU tree that grows all of the 2.0 GHz chips succumbed to an early frost. So AMD has to run with what they have.

Kakarot · Post by **Kakarot** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 1:05 pm

The point is... WHO CARES WHAT SPEED ITS RUNNING AT?!? The Athlon XP running at 1533mhz performs the same if not better than a P4 running at 1800mhz in the real world and probably all the benchmarks too. FINE, then find a way of informing the potential and current customers of this fact with out using some confusing and potentially misleading PR system.

The problem is that AMD is using this "PR" system to say: Hey, the Performance Rating of our chip running at 1533mhz is equivalent to a Pentium 4 running at 1800mhz. I don't think they should be using Intel's chips as a basis to compare their chips too. They should find some neutral way of rating the performance fairly for all CPU's from ALL manufacturer's. Then they can take THAT performance rating and say our chips perform at this level, and theirs perform at that level. Then at that point Mhz is minimized in the consumer's mind and they look at this performance rating of all the CPU's out there and can make up their mind on whats right for them. This eliminates any decieving that the companies can do(like intel doubling the pipeline just to be able to ramp up clock speeds) and making the consumer think a CPU performs better than another just because it's clock speed is higher.

LikeLinus · Post by **LikeLinus** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 1:25 pm

Another problem is they make themselves look bad. They started this huge Mhz war with slam commercials, ad's, everything a few years ago. They had to top Intel to get to 1gig by 2-3 days. Now they backtrack and say "mhz doesnt=performance". Thats just lame. Don't start a fight if you can't finish it and then run home to mommy.

Also this so called "Performance Rating", exactly who is doing this testing? AMD? This isn't an independant firm doing it. So for all we know their PR could be BS and mean jack. Where they get this so called performance rating is odd. It will be very confusing to the customers when someone tries to sell them an AMD 1800 that is 1500mhz! They wont like that.

Lmandrake · Post by **Lmandrake** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 2:44 pm

Nobody believed PR ratings then, and they aren't going to now.

I think it is a sign of desperation on AMD's part, and I don't think it bodes well for the future of meaningful competition with Intel. It is pretty frightening to see that some to the major manufacturers have dropped their AMD lines.

Unfortunately, the consumer and a lot of corporate purchasers will only buy Intel machines. Buying anything else is just taking a chance. Think of the consumer market - is there any reason why Compaq is still in business other than name recognition?

It it says Intel on the outside, it takes some of the worry about what is in the inside. Actual performance - it does not matter.

FuNPoLiCe001 · Post by **FuNPoLiCe001** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 3:52 pm

most people look at PR ratings and go, "bastards liars. Trying to sway me from the ever righteous and godly intel"

AMD is shooting themselves in the foot with this one.

Jim Z · Post by **Jim Z** » Fri Oct 05, 2001 11:11 pm

They had to top Intel to get to 1gig by 2-3 days.

IMHO it's more like Intel had to save face. Do you remember how sparse the 1 GHz PIII was at its introduction? 30-day waits for Dell, etc. AMD saw an opportunity to beat Intel at something and did so. Intel responded by releasing their own GHz chip which was barely available for quite some time.

LikeLinus · Post by **LikeLinus** » Sat Oct 06, 2001 9:18 am

Oh well, atleast Intel didnt run crying home and denounce Mhz when it lost. Sound familiar?

Hipnotic_Tranz · Post by **Hipnotic_Tranz** » Sat Oct 06, 2001 11:09 am

<i>"Why can't they just find a way of educating the general customer instead of bowing down to his/her stupidity or ignorance?"</i>

I personally think that at this point they are just trying to get the most MHz because that is how the get the most publicity. Once they become on top, like intel is now (in the marketing world and all that) then they can begin to educate the people because the people are now ready to listening. A lot of people don't even look at AMD because of the obvious reasons. #1 they are unfamiliar with them and #2 Intel has the most MHz

Now what I don't get is both of these companies don't rely on users like us buying their CPU's, it's mostly selling them out to other compaies like dell and so on (or so I've been told) Well, wouldn't you think these companies would have the knowledge if not more of it, than us and pick AMD knowing it is the better performing CPU? I mean, we as the computer junkies know its the better performing CPU, so why don't the companies such as Dell and gateway know this? Or is it all just comming down to the name because that is what people know? Most likely. Answering my own questions here

LikeLinus · Post by **LikeLinus** » Sat Oct 06, 2001 6:07 pm

Actually the real problem is there is basically very little performance difference to the naked eye between AMD and Intel chips. If you stick a P4 1.7 against a 1.4 Athlon 4, your not going to open that word document any faster or write that email any faster. Your not going to play that DVD faster, and your game isn't going to be any quicker. This is what the general consumer knows and sees. Everyone hear makes this big deal about the benchmarks, but you cannot see 120 frames a second vs 100 frames! The fact that you can get an Intel system just as cheap, why on earth would they get AMD? Sure its cheaper to purchase seperately, but thats such a small market. Consumers are going to keep purchasing what they know is best and familiar with than go with some new company that is having problems. The point is moot, AMD is going to be for the hobbiest industry, they will not dominate OEM or Server/corporate, it's just too much for them. They've bitten off more than they can chew.

Postumus · Post by **Postumus** » Mon Oct 08, 2001 1:39 am

well for every dollar AMD would spend educating intel will spend 10 times that miseducating so thats pointless, I dont like PR ratings but I think AMD has little choice rite now. On the plus side AMD has rather conservative ratings, if you check the benchmarks that is vs a P4.

VidmanII · Post by **VidmanII** » Mon Oct 08, 2001 10:05 am

my 1.4 t-bird @ 1.6 shows a PR rating of 2135 in Sandra 2001te !! :lol

As far as what the general consumers KNOW, that basically translates into JACK sh*t. What suprises me is people who do know about P4's being essentially an inferior solution , even compared to a P3, let alone a t-bird, still go out and buy them. Go figure. I just hope AMD stays afloat one way or another, because if they don't you KNOW *ntel will go back to gouging the hell out of everybody for their 2nd rate crappola.

Just my opinion and last I checked, this was still a free country.