AMD Tunderbird

[bdemenil]

The 1 ghz AMD thunderbird is going for about $175 on pricewatch. The P3 1 gig is more than $100 more - P4s are another story altogether. I've heard some people say the thunderbird performs better on audio than the P3 or P4 (better floating point arithmatic). I've heard others concerned about AMD compatibility with soundcards. So, what's the verdict?

 

[trashcan-man]

For floating point, there is no comparisom AMD blows P3 and P4 out of the water.
Check out

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001122/p4-03.html

which shows benchmarks on Mpeg4 compression algorithm that heavily relies on Floating Point, and shows how poorly the P4 does. Even P3 does better. Floating point is important for audio for programs like Reaktor that sythesize sounds using floating point.

P4 can outperform Athlon if programs make use of SSE2 - Intel's new multimedia instruction set. Unfortunately, no program takes advantage of this. For example, Reaktor 3.0 slated for release in April, 2001 is just coming out with support for SSE - the instruction set extension used in P3.

The compilers used to build the programs do not even support SSE2 yet, so it will some time before audio programs take advantage of SSE2.

For an even cheaper, but still very capable system check out AMD Durons. The floating point unit (FPU) is identical of that of the big brother Thunderbird. A Duron performs floating point calculations at the same speed as the TBird for a given MHz.
If you are into overclocking - a potentially dicey process - then most 700MHz Durons will overclock to 1 GHz.
The main differences between the two is the size of the cache.

But it is true, some cards have problems with the chipsets used in the Athlon motherboards.

I personlly have had a bad experience with Guillemot ISIS in my Athlon system - could not get it to work. Had to RMA the board.

See also for example:

http://www.aardvark-pro.com/aark24_tech_known_incompatibilities.html

for some issues related to Athlon and Aark24.

So before you buy your soundcard - check with the mfr to see if it has been tested in your motherboard.

 

[RWhite]

While I pretty much agree with Trashcan, in fairness the piece on Toms Hardware he points to (November 22) was later partly recinded in a follow-up piece from December 2000. Bottom line is that Pentium 4 is optimized to support software that really doesn't exist yet.

 

[trashcan-man]

The November 22 article did paint the P4 in the worst light.

The subsequent article used re-optimized code with Intel's compiler to produce more favourable P4 resutls. I believe RWhite is referring to this one.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001206/p4-04.html#flask_mpeg_once_more

The caution is to buyers who expect their favorite program - be it a software synth, or a VST plugin - to run faster on a P4. It may run some faster or it may run slower. Be careful before you lay down a few thousand for a new P4 system.

You can be sure of one thing though - any software you have in your hands right now will not be optimized for P4. It may be some time before that occurs. Until then, I wouldn't jump on the P4 bandwagon.

If the software is optimized for SSE2, you can expect much better results. When that occurs, is up to Microsoft to build a compiler with SSE2 optimizations, then to the software manufacturers to produce a new version of their software (free of charge I hope ) with these optimizations.