karth95
Lord of the Cats
The reason I heard that the p4 has some speed issues is that it's pipleine is 20 steps long, so if it fails to properly interperate the instruction (some sort of predictive processing) it has to flush it out of the 20 step pipeline, where an XP chip has a 7 step pipeline, so incorrectly predicted instructions are flushed 1/3 faster, and can be reprocessed faster. The article I recall stated that the p4 has about a 10% failure rate on instructions, while the XP is about 7%, so it makes up for the missing clock cycles by pushing more calculations per cycle.
--Karth
PS... Just so you know I'm not completly AMD's whipping boy... I dislike the athlon XP in one way. I watched a buddy about 3 - 4 months ago turn a 200$ processor into a paperweight, and voided the warrenty, in about 20 seconds. He dropped it in the slot, covered it in thermal, and then instead of putting the hsf on it straight down and levering the sides into place (Diagram: \=/) He did it like this... put in the proc, put on one side of the hsf, and then levered it down on the other side....
/ (heatsink)
_ Processor
so when he pushed the heatsink down toward the other side, it flaked a part of the core off the processor. tiny little sliver, but it's completly unprotected, and the tiniest chip makes it completly unusable. You can get shims, but that isn't comparable to the intel chip with the large, solid heat spreader on top.
--Karth
PS... Just so you know I'm not completly AMD's whipping boy... I dislike the athlon XP in one way. I watched a buddy about 3 - 4 months ago turn a 200$ processor into a paperweight, and voided the warrenty, in about 20 seconds. He dropped it in the slot, covered it in thermal, and then instead of putting the hsf on it straight down and levering the sides into place (Diagram: \=/) He did it like this... put in the proc, put on one side of the hsf, and then levered it down on the other side....
/ (heatsink)
_ Processor
so when he pushed the heatsink down toward the other side, it flaked a part of the core off the processor. tiny little sliver, but it's completly unprotected, and the tiniest chip makes it completly unusable. You can get shims, but that isn't comparable to the intel chip with the large, solid heat spreader on top.
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