Re: Processors
- From: David Wright <david_c_wright@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:13:53 +0100
RS wrote:
What is the difference between Pentium, Celeron, and AMD?
Thanks.
RS
Pretty much what Chris said, the big difference is that Pentium and Celeron
are processors, AMD is a company that makes processors ;-)
Pentium and Celeron come from the Intel stable.
Pentium also comes in more variations than Chris said, there is the Pentium
M as well for mobile, although this was pretty much replaced by the Core
Solo and Core Duo in January.
If you are looking for a new laptop then look for Core Duo, it is the
future, Pentium M is the past.
As Chris said, Pentium is available in single and dual core and 32 and 64
bits depending on the model number, and with varying sized caches, it is a
minefield finding the best combination and the number don't help unless you
know what they mean! I think at the moment if you want to future proof as
much as possible you need to look at the 900 series, which should be
dual-core, 64-bit
Celeron are "cut down" Pentium's for the bottom feeder market. They are
deliberately performance crippled to make them cheaper and appeal to those
looking for a bargain basement machine.
AMD make a range of chips, the most well know being Athlon, Semperon and
Turion (although they make low-power chips like the Geode and many other
specialist chips outside the main PC processor arena, like Intel do as
well).
Athlon: Available in two main varieties, the older and now pretty much
obsolete 32-bit "XP" variant and the more modern "64" variants which, as
the name suggests, are 64-bit. The Athlon also has the X2 variant which is
dual-core.
Semperon: AMD's equivalent to the Celeron for cheap products. Again reduced
cache and reduced performance to fit in with the.
Turion64: AMD's low-power notebook chip, similar in designed purpose to the
Pentium M line from Intel, but running in 64-bits as opposed to 32-bits.
If you are looking at buying now, then you need to weigh up what you are
going to need the machine to do. All of the chips are more than adequate
for general office and multimedia purposes. The Athlon64 and Pentium chips,
backed up by good hardware are fine for modern games.
However, going into the future, it looks like dual core is going to become
more important (c't magazine did some HD video tests and found that you
need a dual-core processor of the Athlon X2 4400+ or Intel equivalent to
play back without dropped frames! And new versions of software like Skype
are feature crippled unless you have a multi-core Intel processor (although
that is a marketing move more than a physical requirement, as the Athlon X2
often outperforms the Intel chips).
Some people prefer AMD some prefer Intel, at the end of the day for the
average customer there isn't a lot to choose. Intel is playing the
pigopolist and trying to strangle AMD out of the market and AMD is playing
David to Intel's Goliath and trying to kill the giant.
Currently AMD desktop chips tend to use less electrical power than the Intel
equivalents (and thus usually require less extreme cooling), although the
next generation Intel chips should address this problem. Likewise the
dual-core from AMD and their 64-bit technology were on the market a long
time before Intel caught up, but it looks like Intel will probably win the
race to 4 and 8 core x86 based chips.
And in the notebook arena AMD Turion is 64 bit, but the Intel Core Duo is
dual core... The next generation Intel should be dual core and 64-bit and
AMD is working on getting Turion to dual-core. Who will win the race?
At the end of the day, avoid Celeron and Semperon unless you are on a very
tight budget. If you want future proofing buy a dual core and 64-bits, the
manufacturer isn't that important and you can probably find good political,
ethical and environmental grounds to justify either manufacturer. If you
don't already have a preference on AMD or Intel, then just buy a PC that
does what you want and don't worry about the manufacturer; otherwise do
some research on the net at site like tomshardware.
If you aren't buying a top-of-the-line gaming rig, you probably aren't going
to see and noticeable difference between the two in everyday performance
terms.
Then there are the server chips AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon...
--
"I got to go figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There's some
way to stop this. It's not like lightning or earthquakes. We've got a bad
thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change."
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
.
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- From: RS
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