Upgrading your CPU used to be a no brainer. If you wanted performance, stability and compatibility there was only one way to go, but at a price. Intel were the undisputed daddy of the CPU market but they weren’t cheap. There were many alternatives including Cyrix and AMD. The former really was a poor mans chip that was great for running office applications, but was an absolute nightmare for playing games. AMD, on the other hand, had merit. They had some compatibility problems but performed well, and most importantly, were cheap.
Gradually AMD started to catch up with Intel, their K6 2 answering Intels MMX technology with their own version called 3DNow. This was fairly well received with many games including Quake 2 adding support for 3DNow. The Pentium 2 was still very expensive compared to the K62 and this played in AMD's favour. Intel then released the Celeron range to capture the lower end of the market. This really became a favourite of gamers partly because of it's price but more so because of its legendary overclockability. The high quality of Intels manufacturing process meant that many Celeron 300a's would happily run at 450 (my own included). Whilst the lesser cache meant that it did not perform as well as a genuine P2 450, it did an exceptionally good job considering the cost. The tide had again swung in Intels favour.
Then AMD’s Athlon actually started to pull away from Intels Pentium 3. The Athlon was able to outperform the Pentium 3 in many games although they have yet to match Intels compatibility. Many people may remember the problems with Max Payne and the Athlon before it was patched. However the few little glitches were worth it considering the extra performance and the difference in price,particularly as the incompatibilities never really affected simmers as all our sims worked fine on the Athlon. Intels Celeron range was still proving popular and AMD responded with their Duron range although this never won the hearts of gamers in the way that the Celeron had.
With the advent of the Pentium 4 though Intel have been gradually climbing back up to their old location at the top of the heap. The performance gap between Intel and AMD was once again closed with each companies CPU having advantages over the other in different situations. Now things became less clear, with the Pentium 4 chips costing pretty much the same as an equivalent Athlon, performance became the only factor. AMD had long since dropped their infamous PR rating and were now competing at a MHz for MHz level and AMD had won the race to 1GHz by a hair.
Intel were the first to move over to the 0.13 micron and gradually started to pull ahead in the MHz race with faster and faster chips and won the race to 2GHz by a length. AMD responded with the release of the AthlonXP series and a return to the PR rating with the 1500+ running at 1.33 GHz 1600+ at 1.4GHz. They moved up in 66MHz jumps untill moving over to their 0.13 micron Thoroughbred chipset allowing them to finally hit the 2GHz barrier with their AthlonXP 2500+
Not so long ago AMD announced their Athlon XP 2600+ using the Thoroughbred core and clocking in somewhere around 2.13GHz. A few days ago at ECTS Intel responded with their latest addition to the Pentium 4 family of processors, the Northwood 2.8 GHz.. It seems only a short while ago that we were struggling to breach the 1 GHz barrier and now Intel are getting closer to breaking the 3GHz barrier. A barrier that Intel’s Dan Snyder assures me, they are confident of breaking before the end of the year, putting them almost a full GHz ahead of AMD.
Some may argue that clock speeds are not the most important thing but then I guess that depends on whether you are in front or behind in the GHz wars. However, Intel were not content to have the fastest core speed, they have also gone for the most bandwidth too with their 533MHz front side bus. While AMD are still using the 266 FSB, the Pentium® 4 processor supports Intels highest performance desktop system bus by delivering 3.2 GB of data per second into and out of the processor. This is accomplished through a physical signalling scheme of quad pumping the data transfers over a 100-MHz clocked system bus and a buffering scheme allowing for sustained 533-MHz data transfers. The Pentium 4 is also able to take advantage of RDRAM using the dual memory channels on the Intel 850 chipset to give a far greater memory bandwidth.
For us Flight Simmers the choice is definitely swinging in Intels favour. Raw cpu power is still very much required to get the best out of our sims despite the current video cards having dedicated GPU’s. The graphics card renders the geometry, lighting and textures etc but the CPU still has to deal with such things as collision detection, Artificial Intelligence (which is becoming ever more complex) the physics engine, flight models and all the other elements that make up the sim. This all has to be processed before the info is sent to the graphics card to draw the scene and for each frame this has to be repeated. An awesome graphics card is wasted on an average CPU, both the CPU and the GPU play a big part in making games run well, particularly RTS games and Flight Sims which tend to place a heavier burden on the CPU than on the graphics card. Falcon 4 particularly needs a beefy cpu to handle the campaign, as evidenced by the missile pass through problem on lower end cpu's running at high detail + high density + high bubble settings.
AMD will soon be responding with their Hammer line of chips, however the rumour is that Intel are set to respond by adding Hyper-Threading to their P4 line. Hyper-Threading is already available on their Xeon line of processors. Hyper-Threading is Intels implementation of a technique known as Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). This basically allows a single CPU to act more like a dual CPU system without the need to have two cores on one die.
So things are definitely set to heat up in the CPU market and this can only be a good thing for simmers. But for the time being and for the immediate future it looks like Intel is back on top. As the 2.8 chips are still pretty thin on the ground at the moment I’ll be putting a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 to the test soon to see just how well it actually performs in flight sims. From what I saw at ECTS though I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.
