Was Athlon 64 faster than Pentium 4?

In September it’s been exactly 20 years since the amazing Athlon 64 was launched, and boy-o-boy, did AMD changed the game or what?
#retro #computer
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[@IronicTonic8]

The Athlon 64 needs dual channel memory to stretch its legs.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Back then I skipped the entire P4 and Athlon64 generation, I used a AMD Barton 2600+ overclocked at 2300 mhz (11.5x200) up until the Core 2 Duo. But if I would have to choose between those two, I would choose the Athlon64 since it consumes less power and has a very similar performance.

[@toquita3d]

These are fantastic results for the Athlon considering it has nearly half the TDP and is clocked at 2.2 GHz. AMD was on point.

[@philscomputerlab]

Hehe opening old wounds of the eternal question 😊😅

[@benrogers84]

The Athlon’s XP rating came from comparing it to an Athlon thunderbird I think.

[@eleven99]

Crazy how AMD didn't change their heatspreader design for almost 20 years.

[@8wal_zu19]

Dual Channel vs. Single Channel. Maybe that is the reason Pentium 4 is bit faster?

[@mari2.]

the reason why the P4 beat Athlon in software rendering unreal is because rendering tasks are beneficial to the Pentium 4 due to its Branch Prediction being accurate enough to get though more predictable and repetitive tasks such as Rendering

[@kenh6096]

There was a weird cult around the early AMD 64bit chips back then. I remember posting up some productivity based performance comparisons back then and got so much abuse for it. People got really upset as to how well the Pentium 4s were doing in things like rendering in Lightwave and compressing videos. Probably the biggest upset I remember was on the SETI@home forum. I posted showing how Hyper Threading would allow you to parallel the work flow with proportionality little impact on each instances performance and in so making the processor well suited for this specific task. The two chip manufactures just had just radically different architectures and so each was better a different things.

[@BettyBo-zg1ok]

My first machine was a 750 Athlon 64 3200+. Glad I went AMD for my first build, I didn't know much about P4 back then but I kept hearing that AMD was the better one for gaming at the time.

[@NikiDaDude]

The takeaway is that AMD were spot on with their 3200 "performance" rating.

[@outtheredude]

The original Socket 754 Athlon 64 3200+ was a notably handicapped CPU, what with being stuck with just single channel memory running on just one thread, compared with the Socket 478 P4 3.20E Prescott with it's dual channel memory controller and Hyperthreading, theoretically allowing the P4 Prescott to handle boring background tasks on a second thread, allowing games to run smoother. The P4 Prescott having additional SSE3 support as well may have given it a further advantage, particularly with later games and software in general.

[@tennickjestzajety69]

A64 at socket 754 are counterpart of P4 Northwood, Presshot should be compared to 939 cpus or remove one stick of ram to compensate performance drop due to single channel.

[@jbaroli]

Back in the day, I managed to get an Opteron 146 (Athlon64 with 1 MB of cache) installed in a 939Dual SATA2 from ASRock, and it destroyed my friends P4 Prescott, which ran hotter, and were far more expensive. Great times.

[@davidp4456]

That was interesting. Thank you for putting in the time to make this comparison. I think in day to day life you would not really notice as the differences are very marginal. My conclusion is that they are the same (almost). How would this comparison be on the socket 775 vs 939 platforms? I’d be interested in the 65w Cedar Mill P4 vs comparable single core A64 / Opteron. Also why was the memory limited to 4GB on these 64 bit platforms. Why didn’t they add more ram slots? Also is there a way of engineering a higher memory capacity. Would this work? I have some 2GB DDR1 server memory modules. They generally don’t work on regular mother boards, but it would be great to set these up so that I can have 8GB of accessible memory.

[@chazbotic]

man, i was always curious about how the athlon64 was because i never had a chance to use one - i went from a Duron 650 to a Athlon XP 2100+ (Palomino i think), then XP 3200+ (Barton), then skipped a bunch of time when i was out of PC gaming and came back with a prebuilt that had a Wolfdale Core 2 Duo E8400 (which i eventually upgraded to a Q9650. i wonder between an OC Barton 3200+ vs the athlon 64 3200+ stock which you were better off with and if the memory or motherboard quality made up any differences for the older CPU.

[@achaycock]

I bought the Athlon64 back in the day, very shortly after it came out on the consumer platform. Here in the UK, I found that the Athlon64 3200+ was substantially cheaper than a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, with the 2.8GHz processors being their more usual competitor. All of the 3.2GHz CPU's were far more expensive than the price you listed there. I bought a 3400+ which runs at the same clockspeed, but has double the L2 cache. I believe that made a small difference at times, making it a much closer match to the 3.2GHz Pentium 4. I was using nForce 3 with 400MHz memory. It could support 3 slots.

[@erebos007]

Thank you :) What would be interesting to know is what system is more compatible ?

[@thegreatboto]

Didn't run one at the time, but looks like main thing that held back the A64 vs the P4 was all memory related. A64 only had single channel memory and half the cache.

[@detalite]

I would like to see comparison: Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 754 vs Athlon 64 3200+ Socket 939. How much boost you can get with dual chanel. Socket 939 was released in 2004 the same year Pentium 4 3.2E