Processor speeds different with AMD vs. Intel?

[videotape74]

Ok...I have an AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ operating at 2.13GHz. Now why is it I've been told by many people that this is equal to 2.80GHz???

Is there a difference in the processor speeds and how they're measured between AMD vs. Intel? Any info would be great...thanks.

[mh2360]

I found this picture a while ago while googling around. I don't know how accurate it is but I've no reason to think that it isn't. It seems to tally with the performance data I get with my systems...

cpu%20performance.jpg

Nowadays the numbers after the processor name don't mean as much as they used to, its all down to performance benchmarks like this...

If you look at the Athlon 2800+ and the P4 2.8ghz, there's not as much difference as you might expect.

[JohnnyMalaria]

It harks back to when Intel launched the P4. The original P4s were technologically crippled. Rushed to market before they were really ready. Somehow, Intel tried to convince the world that they could simply rely on brute force (aka clock speed) and do away with the inconveniences of level 2 cache etc. At that time, AMD could match the performance at a lower clock speed. AMD retained the all-important level 2 cache. If AMD labelled their CPUs with their true clock speeds, they'd lose out to Intel in sales since "2.1GHz can't be as good as 2.8GHz, surely (!)"

Well, the original P4 has finally been consigned to the evolutionary dead-end where it belongs. Intel's latest CPUs show their ancestry with the more humble PIII. The PIII architecture was very efficient - but the manufacturing processes of the time limited it to a maximum clock speed of 1GHz or so. When the P4 was launched, their own benchmarks showed very clearly that, at the same clock speed, the P4 performed worse than the PIII. But the PIII had reached its clock speed ceiling at that time.

The Pentium M laptop processor (that I'm using now) runs at 1.5GHz. It out-performs a 1.8GHz P4 laptop.

With Core Duo and Core 2 Duo, Intel (quietly) re-introduced large amounts of level 2 cache. Coupled with their PIII lineage, they are marvels of processing power.

[thecoalman]

Different chips provide different performance at the same frequency. For example if there was such a thing as a 3.0ghz P1 it wouldn't perform anywhere near what a 3.0ghz P4 would.

[jagabo]

Large number of processor and application benchmarks:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html

Right now, at least in the midrange, equaly priced CPUs from AMD and Intel have roughly the same performance.