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Introduction

The competition between AMD and Intel has escalated even more with the release of AMD’s XP 1800+. If you look at what AMD is up against, you see it’s an uphill battle all the way to the top with Intel’s chips at 2000MHz. While Intel has claimed the higher MHz crown, it may not necessarily have claimed the performance crown. All processors are governed by a very simply equation:

Just from the equation, you can see that clock speed isn’t everything that counts, so a well-rounded processor should have both to achieve top performance.

Without further delay, let’s see if the AMD XP 1800+ can perform better than Intel’s P4 processors.

Test System

• AMD XP 1800+ (1533 MHz)
• FIC AZ11EA KT133A+686B chipset
• Micron PC-133 256MB SDRAM
• Inno3D GeForce 3 64MB DDR
• WD 30GB 7200RPM HDD
• Windows 98SE
• DirectX 8
• nVidia Detonator XP v21.83

Testing Procedures And Software

I ran H.Oda’s WCPUID to get some information about the test system for verification purposes. As you can see the Front Side Bus is a little higher than normal at 133.30 and that adds up to 1532.90 MHz. A lot of newer motherboards come with overclocked Front Side Bus to add extra performance at around ~134 while normal FSB clock at ~132-133. The only thing that I didn’t like about the FIC motherboard is that it wasn’t using DDR Ram but looking at it from a comparison side, not many P4 systems use DDR either.

CPU and MULTIMEDIA BENCHMARK – SiSoft Sandra 2001

Naturally the 3 FPU units in the AMD processor is going to beat the 2 FPU units in an Intel P4 processor. While the Intel P4 reference data shows a P4 1.6GHz, the clock speed here didn’t really help beat the AMD. At 4263 MIPs and 2118 FLOPs, the AMD XP 1800+ smoked the P4 1.6GHz chip that had a higher clock speed but only produced 3065 MIPS and 1955 FLOPS. Can I say “EAT MY DUST?”