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by Pongky on July 16th, 2003

Pongky

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In terms of MegaHertz (in CPU rating, and also the motherboard speed), the AMD processor platform is much slower than the Pentium IV counterpart, what does this mean in terms of speed and performance in relation to gaming and frame rates?

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  • by Karaethon on August 12th, 2003

    Karaethon

    When you break down all CPUs to the most basic elements, every CPU processes instructions. These instructions are things such as a load, and add, a store, a jump, etc. When software is compiled into machine language, it is in some form of these basic instruction sets (to some standard such as x86). Without getting into too much detail of computer architecture, the instructions can be broken up and classified by general types. Each type of instruction will take x number of clock cycles.

    Now, when you get down to a chip's architecture, you have to take other architectural elements into account such as multi-cycle, pipelining, and superscaling. At this point, design of processors diverge. A manufacterer (Intel) can choose to create their processor in order to process fewer instructions per clock cycle (on average) in exchange for having more clock cycles (and higher megahertz) a second whereas a second manufacturer (AMD) can choose to create their processor so it will process more instructions per cycle (on average) in exchange for fewer cycles (and lower megahertz) a second.

    What this means in relation to gaming (as well as any other application) is that Intel may be faster (and produce more frames) in any one given application while AMD will be faster (and produce more frames) in another given application. The cause of this is the number of a certain type of instruction once the game is compiled. By choosing a certain architecture to follow, Intel may excel in an application where there are a lot of load and store instructions whereas AMD may excel in an application where there is a lot of arithmetic calculation (I'm simply theorizing here about what type of instructions each processor will excel in, so don't use that as an answer).

    While this answer may not be very satisfying since it is essentially saying "it depends," I do believe that the current Intel flagship processors are faster than similarly rated AMD processors for gaming purposes.

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