Comments Locked

28 Comments

Back to Article

  • eBauer - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link

    I'd like to see a P4 3.2-3.4 w/ dual channel DDR3200 used instead of single channel DDR2700 that was used for the P4 testbed - as a rough idea where a Dell 9100/XPS, for example, would fall in line with the Dothan.
  • bhtooefr - Saturday, July 24, 2004 - link

    Something else I noticed - where's the Banias 1.7 and the Dothan 735? It would make comparing Banias to Dothan so much easier to do that...

    Also, what motherboards did you use on the desktop chips?

    #25: Take a look at http://cpu-museum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1089. PowerLeap actually DID have something in the works, and was going to release in Quarter 1, but they cancelled it because of (well, at least this is what they said - I wouldn't be surprised if it was because Intel held them at gunpoint) LGA775 coming out (which can't really work with an adaptor) and the fact that the P-M wasn't running at 2.0GHz (I told them about Dothan, though).
  • Zebo - Saturday, July 24, 2004 - link

    What are you talking about #4 and #17?

    Intels "dominace" in encoding? Those days are history my friends. If they ever were.

    Anandtech's article published just before this one was proves it. Here's a quote:

    "It was difficult to resist being a little sensationalist in this 939 roundup and titling the review, "Who needs 925X?" That would have been a fair title, however, since you can clearly see that all of the Socket 939/FX53 boards completely outperform Intel's top 560 on the top 925X motherboard. Even Media Encoding, the last bastion of Intel dominance, has fallen in benchmarks with our new AutoGK benchmark. "

    As a matter of a fact it's always been a mismoner if you look at other suites/Codecs such as:

    Codecs: xVID

    Consumer programs: Ulead VideoStudio 4,5,6 and 7. Roxio videowave 4,5,6 and 7. Pinnacle studio 7.


    MPEG2 Encoders: Canopus procoder, Ligos, bbMPEG.
    DVD transcoding: DVD2AVI, VirtualDubMod

    Freeware: VirtualDub.

    Streaming: Quicktime.

    Shot out to alex;)
  • T8000 - Thursday, July 22, 2004 - link

    Since the Pentium M shares its bus protocol with the Pentium 4, I think companies like Powerleap should be more then able to provide an adaptor for desktop use.

    This would likely result in an "Intel unknown" detection, along with a lack of power save options, but previous experience with the "Tualatin" P3(1400) learned that this could work and even offer full performance compared to a full recognition.

    Also, I think the limited memory bandwith did not hold Athlon 64 back, because I still remember seeing Athlon FX (dual channel) and 64 (sinle channel) perform almost equal for the same clockspeed. However, the Pentium 4 would benefit from more bandwith, as happened before on every FSB bump it got. So I think adding faster memory would only make a noticeable difference for the Pentium 4.
  • SKiller - Thursday, July 22, 2004 - link

    I didn't say it would make up *all* the performance, but enough to make it competetive. For example: the P4 is essentially faster than A64 in those tasks but the A64 is still sufficiently close to be a viable altermative. Dothan doesn't have to beat the P4 in media encoding or content creation, just come close enough to be a good desktop CPU. It should be possible by increasing the FSB.
  • Xentropy - Thursday, July 22, 2004 - link

    #3 - "As you'd expect from 90nm, the leakage power has shot right up, meaning that in its low power states, the CPU is draining a great deal more power than Banias."

    Oh? Link to more info on this, please.
  • TrogdorJW - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    One comment I forgot to mention: even with the talk of thermal design targets and clock speed limitations, I imagine that a Dothan CPU in a desktop motherboard with a large copper heatsink would have quite a lot of overclocking headroom. I know there was a French site that claimed to have overclocked a Dothan to 2.4 GHz, and the performance was quite impressive (if true). I would really like to see overclocking results for Dothan (and Banias) on a desktop system. With processors designed to generate 1/4 the amount of heat of a P4 3.2+, it could be interesting. Here's hoping some motherboard manufacturers will accommodate us! :)
  • TrogdorJW - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Overall, I thought this was a great article. Those complaining about various configuration issues need to stop whining. Never once did AT actually give out any numbers for battery life or low-power performance, or claim that the Dothan was beating a desktop Athlon 64/P4. All we're looking at is what the various can do in typical *laptop* configurations. Getting a P4 and A64 laptop would make them into real laptops, but then we would have the laptop manufacturer's configuration, and likely it wouldn't be the same as what they had for the Dothan system. What we've got is three platforms running the same RAM, Hard Drive, and graphics card. Yes, it's limiting what some of the CPUs could do, but it's about as fair as you can get.

    Of course, if history is any indication, I'm fairly confident that Dothan is going to dominate other mobile architectures in battery life - when using the same screen, hard drive, and battery. Too bad it's so difficult to actually meet those criteria. Screens differ quite a bit, and many P4 and A64 laptops are shipping with 90+ kWhrs batteries, while Banias and Dothan laptops often get by with 60 to 70 kWhrs. Anyway, the Banias was generally the best laptop CPU before (i.e. most efficient while still providing good performance), so why shouldn't the Dothan be similar if not better? The results are hardly surprising.

    I really hope that we one day see some desktop boards designed for Dothan, though. I imagine that getting the FSB up to 200 MHz quad-pumped should be possible, although even 133 or 166 would be helpful. Combine a Dothan CPU with all the other desktop accoutrements, and it would likely be a formidable gaming platform. Of course, it would really only be about the same as Athlon 64, and Intel is currently milking the Dothan/Banias line for all they can. $600+ for a processor that probably costs Intel less money to create than their P4 chips.

    Again, great article, Anand. (And for the interested, Jon "Hannibal" Stokes over at Ars Technica put together as much information as I've seen anywhere about how the internals of the Banias/Dothan function. Not much detail in comparison to other CPU comparision articles he's written, but there is some additional information about what ops can benefit from the fusion technique, IIRC.)
  • rocketbuddha - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Acer(for sure) & Emachines(AFAIK) use a 4200 RPM HDD not a 5400 RPM HDD.

    The problem is that the available Athlon laptops are castrated in some level

    a) Poor Graphics card(This changed with A64).
    b) Lower speed HDDs.(Of course Aleinware, FNW fix with high end components pricing goes to the roof.)
    c) Only 4 from a list of 32 varying modes by PowerNow!

    With these either of these three there no way would a mobile A64 laptop would be in its best form for comparision.
  • SnakeJG - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    I would also like to see this review updated with an Athlon 64 with 1 meg L2 cache. It seems a shame to compare an expensive 2 meg L2 cache Dothan with the cheaper 512KB L2 cache Athlon 64's. In addition, by keeping Athlon 64's to the slower/single channel RAM, you are making the L2 cache more important than normal, and hindering the Athlon 64.
  • phtbddh - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    What is the battery life of a Dothan compared to a Banias? I know the Dothan is suppose to be better, but can we see some numbers?
  • tfranzese - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Not quite SKiller, a large part of the P4's dominance in media encoding is the high core frequency attributed to such a long pipeline.
  • SKiller - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    I think the assertion that..

    "With Intel's vision for the future being centered on media encoding and content creation, the Pentium M is the last thing that Intel would want to build their future desktop CPUs around."

    ..may not be correct as by your own admission:

    "Partially constrained by its 400MHz FSB and single channel memory interface, the Pentium M is not the successor to the Pentium 4 that many will make it out to be."

    So all Intel would have to do is up the FSB on a desktop version to improve media encoding and content creation performance and be competitive with P4.
  • mkruer - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    you know i wonder just how much of the preformance is gained from the 2MB of L2 cache. If I recall from Aceshardware the 2MB is the sweetspot For mico op code, any more, and there is a preformance hit in either direction, Also on a side note. The 90nm Athlon 64 show a ~5% improvement across the board.
  • dvinnen - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Yea, I was wondering the same thing. Why not just use a mobile A64 system with a mobile 9600. Acer and emachines make systems with them.
  • alexruiz - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Another one: Was that difficult to get an eMachines M68xx for the review? Mobile against mobile.
  • alexruiz - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Anand made a huge mistake in the Athlon 64 CPU selection. The mobile [b]A64 3000+ is clocked at 1.8 GHz with a 1MB L2 cache[/b]. He used a desktop 2.0 GHz with 512 K. This will affect the outcome, specially because clock speed matters more cache.

    I knew Dotham was going to give a very good fight, but I didn't expect it to win any gaming application ot Business Winstone. As reference, my M6805 A64 3000+ scores 22.2 and 27.8 in the BW and CCMW tests (7K60 hard drive, so not the same setup)

    A very good review, but we can do better. I still want to see video encoding tests run with a commercial application, preferably 3 (Ulead Video Studio 8, Roxio Videowave 7, Pinnacle 9) and 2 alternative programs for DivX encoding (DVD2AVI and virtualdubmod are suggested. We have seen enough XMPEG from other sites)

    Run some photoedition benchmarks not only with Adobe, but also with Corel Photopaint 11 or Roxio Photosuite.

    AutoCAD is also expected to give an idea of what be attained. SolidWorks or UG would be fantastic, but those 2 are more of a wish.

    How about more scientific or technical programs? Electrical simulators (PSpice for example), FEA (Nastran), MathCAd, Maple, etc.

    More games were expected to be run. Howe about chess programs? How about OSmark, the succesor of COSBI by Van Smith?

    I stressed the use of 2 or more applications that do the same to highlight the fact that software optimization matters a lot and that some myth about a CPU being "the best for that activity" are only myths.

    All in all, Dotham is a potent rival that uncovers some weaknesses in the K7/K8 architecture that were noticeable against the P6 (Pentium II/III) but forgotten against the P7 (Pentium 4): [b]L2 cache performance[/b] and integer performance.

    Regarding battery life keep in mind that the CPU is not the biggest spender in a laptop, the screen is. The K8T800, the most popular chipset for AMF64 laptops is a desktop part, and is quite voracious. Keep those factor when battery life is evaluated.

    I foresee that SOI will give AMD the edge in battery life once they implement power saving caches, the biggest energy conservation feature in the P-M.

    Comments are welcome


    Alex
  • dacaw - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Well Dothan looks very much like a copy of a 32-bit AthlonXP to me.

    Comparing it to an Athlon64 makes no sense. Dothan is not 64-bit.

    I bought an AthlonXP Barton mobile 2600 for $99 and it runs barely warm under PowerNow. What could you buy for the price of a Dothan? Maybe 5 top-of-the-line Athlon XPs?

    Let's compare apples to apples and have a review of top-of-the line Dothan to top-of-the-line AthlonXP.

    Oh, and drop those fake synthetic benchmarks. What point are they if they simply "favor" Intel processors (your comment in the review).

    Come on Anand, lets have a review that really means something. Please!
  • Jeff7181 - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Can't wait to see battery life tests.
  • mino - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Nice review, however it is a shame you didn't include Celeron 2.4 (which could be find in many SLOW notebooks) and also AXP-M 2600+ would be nice. -> this way it would be a complete notebook market review. - The best one.

    I'll love to see bench results of Cely and XP added (by using same desktop platform as you did in case of P4)

    mino
  • nserra - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    #3 I agree. Banias is a better chip. It would be nice to see Banias at 0.09 with 1MB cache, would be smaller, cheaper and a lot more chips per waffer, but Intel isn't interested in these yet, at least maybe a Celeron line when Banias phased out.

    Isn't Ati 9100 chipset compatible with Banias and P4 compatible? A bios change or something more wouldn’t do the trick?
  • Matthew Daws - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Interesting read. Some comments though: the Dothan has a HUGE L2 cache, which people, in a thread over at Ace's, suggest gives it a large edge in many applications (there were complaints that it excels in SpecInt simply because of this, and with very large datasets, performance rapidly tails off). Nothing wrong with that, but it might explain why the Dothan has issues with media-encoding and the like, where the volume of data is so large that the size of the L2 cache becomes less important.

    Also, the test was a little bit of comparing apples to oranges. I see why this was done: to try and give a laptop-like playing field. But Dothan is almost certainly highly optimised to run with, say, single channel, slow RAM. By forcing this on Athlon64 and Pentium 4 desktops, which are optimised for fatter memory channels, you are slightly crippling performance. As such, it's probably a fair test for laptop performance, but probably doesn't indicate how a Dothan-like desktop chip would hold up. This might explain how well it holds its own against the Athlon64 and beats the P4 in many tests.

    Anyhow, good to see a great test of Dothan! Cheers, --Matt
  • xsilver - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Just a question... I thought the new sucessor to the prescott was going to be the derivative of the dothan -- eg merging back the mobile and desktop solutions? I'm wrong right? So what exactly are they going to replace prescott with?
  • morcegovermelho - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Where are the Athlon 64 3000+ scores in Sysmark 2004? (page 8)
  • DigitalDivine - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    interesting to see that we are going back to the old days when intel and amd matches each other clock for clock. a 1.8ghz centrino about the same as a 1.8ghz athlon64.

    still another note that the p4 is still king in media encoding.

    overall a nice review.

  • adntaylor - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Excellent chip. However, it's bloody expensive. At $637 it is exactly the same price as a 3.6GHz Prescott 560 or right between Athlon 64 3500+ and 3700+, so it's not a good choice for the desktop.

    Also Anand's comment "...it's faster and uses less power than Banias" is not quite accurate.

    Under full CPU load, yes this is certainly true but, as you'd expect from 90nm, the leakage power has shot right up, meaning that in its low power states, the CPU is draining a great deal more power than Banias. How much time does a laptop spend idling relative to flat out? My guess: quite a bit. I'd still choose a Banias in my laptop for that reason alone.

    Still good article, and I'd love (from a purely academic point of view) to see what this baby could do when coupled up with a dual-channel memory interface and a good desktop chipset!
  • sprockkets - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    Probably the best heat vs. performance processor out there, at least for x86. Why Intel is dumb to shove Prescotts which use 5x more power for the same performance is beyond me; I would get this for a desktop quicklike.

    Of course, we have Intel's TDP instead of what the processor may acutally put out on worst case conditions. That and we don't know what the Athlon 64 at 90nm will put out, at least at 2.0ghz, since all they are doing is a few tweaks to the core (isn't it smaller than 100mm?) That and I guess if you really meant unpatented, that was what to make sure no one really knows why it's so great?
  • mkruer - Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - link

    I’m glad that Intel seem to be moving in the right direction with the Dothan, but I do have a question. Why on half the benchmarks is the Athlon benchmarks missing?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now