Someone explain AMD's marketing to me...
 

Is it just me, or do you find AMD's current marketing number methodology frustrating? It makes me crazy that they mark a CPU with the number 2200 and are actually selling a core operating frequency of 1.8ghz. To me, this seems to be a means of obfuscating the truth and confusing the market into purchasing their seemingly, cheaper processors.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/cont...C_WP_FINAL.pdf

Maybe its just me ...

well the say its because their processors are faster and coz consumers use Mhz as a selling point they match the rating to the equivalent intel, however thats a hard thing to do its very general and not always true.

But likewise, if you were to make that "direct" comparison, by what means to do they compensate for their slower 166-400mhz FSB? I think Intel is up to 800MHz FSB now?

like i said, its hard , general and not always true :)

Thier just showing the public the point that megahertz means jack shit. Theres other things that fall into play that make a cpu what it is.

But other then that, I dont really mind the name setup they have, takes ya a whole 3 extra seconds to find what the "speed" is of the cpu, no big deal.

Yeah, if you wanna know which model is which speed, just head on over to Pricewatch and do a CPU search, or go to www.amd.com . I was confused by it at first, but after I looked into it it doesn't bother me.

Better architecture. An Athlon XP at 1.6 GHz will perform as well as a 533 MHz FSB Pentium 4 at 2.2 GHz. Athlon XPs are simply designed incredibly well. The only chips that pentium released that were a good bit ahead were the 3.06 and 3.2 HT Pentium 4's. AMD released the high-end Bartons after that which were nearly as powerful. Now, AMD has launched the Athlon 64's. The Athlon 64 3200+ is about the equivalent of a 3.06 HT P4, and the Athlon 64 FX-51 is as good if not better than the 3.2 HT P4 AND the 3.2 HT EE P4. The Athlon 64 FX-51's have a theoretical 1.6 GHz bus speed.

AMD is simply proving that clock speeds mean nothing. Incredible CPU design and more on-board L cache is what keeps the Athlon CPUs in the market.

-Lasereth

basically... if you read this...


http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/..._177_3472_1353^3841^9078^3759,00.html

basically... intel p4 does 6 instructions per cycle vs. 9 instructions per cycle in an athlon... this is where the performance rating is derived from... so an athlon xp2800+ can perform at 2800mhz compared to an intel but is only running at 2.09ghz... a amdxp3200+ running at 2.2ghz can easily compete with a p4 3.2ghz... but it also depends on the application

hope that helps

Officially the number means it's equivelent to a XXXXMhz T-Bird (not exaclty sure which, but one of the older ~1Ghz procs).

Officially.

But really it's there attempt to stop losing sales to people who look at one number and that is the chip's frequency.

The only thing that pisses me off about AMD is that there are very few magazine or tv ads.....people that barely know what a computer is knows what a intel pentium 4 is....but they have never heard of an AMD processor :(

Yeah that sucks. I have had people ask what processor I have and I tell them a 1Ghz Athlon they don't know what it is, so I end up saying Pentium III, just so they'll understand.

This is the same sort of problem that Apple has when trying to compare with Intel chips. The chip architectures are different such that an 800 MHz G4 isn't the same as an 800 MHz Pentium. I don't want to go down that road (Apple vs Intel) in this thread, but some might say the G4 800 is roughly comparable to a P3 1.2 GHz (or even faster). It's hard to say as they run different software.

Anyway, AMD's branding works for me. A 2200+ is roughly equivalent to the P4-2.2. Since AMD chips cost much less than their Intel brethren the confusion over bus speeds is somewhat irrelevant.

The Intel CPU may be the benchmark, but the Athlon wins the "value proposition."