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Hey! I'm looking into getting an Athlon. I've used Pentiums for a while, but at one point I used an Athlon. It was incredibly slow when I was playing games, and when I was playing Delta Force Land Warrior, it said I didn't have MMX. Is anyone a game with an Athlon, and is it slow?
Yes I game with an athlon, no it is not slow. The latest athlons (Athlon XPs) have SSE, while the older ones, slot A and thunderbirds, do not.
For pretty much every current game out, on equal costs, an athlon will outperform a pentium 4, even those with heavy SSE optimizations. Per clock, which is about where the price equality is, the athlon is much faster than the Pentium 4. If you want the ultra highest performance for now, the fastest processor is debatable, but if you want the best value, it's surely an AMD.
Please forgive my ignorance, but I have another question.:D
Is the Athlon XP compatible with Linux? It's called the athlon XP! Sorry for the stupid question, but I'm ignorant on the subject.
yes...
And even the first Athlons had MMX support -- I know, because I *have* one of the first Athlons, and I have programmed using MMX with it.
If you didn't have MMX support, it's likely you were using one of the K6 series (earlier AMD chips), not an Athlon. The K6 series worked well for business apps, but lost in processor-heavy games because of no MMX (although they have 3dnow! which isn't that widely supported) and they had a crummy math coprocessor. Athlons are awesome for gaming, even a 600 MHz Athlon can provide an incredible gaming experience.
Shoot...I didn't mean to say Athlon, I meant to say AMD. =)
Ahh... AMD has come far; they used to be the "budget chips" used for people who didn't care about performance. Now, the Athlons outperform Intel chips.
It's really funny; back when I got into computers (the end of the 386 era) I would have laughed if someone would have told me AMD would surpass Intel for performance.
Well, now...
I think I'll buy a Athlon chip instead of Intel chip...
AMD is better than Intel?
You mean Athlon > Pentium 4??
I gotta admit it, it is better!
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322reenignE
>have told me AMD would surpass Intel for performance.
y'know, i'd have said the same... times change... [personally, i'm going for ross perot and cyrix... :)]
wasn't cyrix the "cheaper alternative" a while after AMD started gaining Intel ground? i think so...
Cyrix was another of the uber-cheap processor manufacturers; their chips were of questionable quality at times, and Cyrix has changed hands -- first merging with National, they were sold to Via and I believe are completely out of the home-user CPU market at this time.
At the time, Cyrix designed chips which were manufactured by IBM -- so IBM 386 through 6x86 chips were identical to Cyrix except in the name stamped on the chip. Cyrix was initially only a design firm -- they never manufactured their own CPUs until they merged with National; other people (most notably IBM) built CPUs that Cyrix designed.
It was funny, the PC market used to be often called the "IBM-compatible" market (dunno how many people, if any, still call it that). But, at one point, IBM processors became no longer compatible with the standards that the IBM-compatible market embraced.
And yes, Athlons will outperform their Pentium 3 or Pentium 4 counterparts, in virtually all types of testing and use. Plus, they're cheaper. The only problem with the VERY early Athlons is that the first motherboards for Athlons sucked; I bought my first Athlon just after the Asus K7M came out (the first truly decent Athlon mobo).
Nowadays, either choice of processor is a good buy -- I personally have always gone AMD since the Athlon, and I have yet to be disappointed.