PIII or Athlon?

[Guest]

There isn't a hardware site I know of that would recommend the PIII over the Athlon.

However, in this particular case, the manufacturer claims that a PIII performs better than the Athlon because his software is finetuned for the PIII.

The software in question is the MPEG2 software encoder CinemaCraft SP.

I've been asking around for people using this software on both platforms, with little success. So, here I want to ask it in a more theoretical way.

How much faster will a dual PIII 933 be than an Athlon (T-bird) 1 GHz, when the software is optimised for the PIII SSE instructions?

I'm trying to asses if the extra investment for the dual PIII rig is worth it or not.

Any input on this problem very welcome, thanks.

Neko

 

[Guest]

I read somewhere that upcoming Athlons will support SSE and maybe SSE2 instructions.

Anyways, a dual P3 platform would be quite expensive and I believe an Athlon 1.2Ghz platform would perform at least as well as the P3 solution all the jobs you throw at it.



- Better go Green than Blue!

 

[FUGGER]

That application is optimized for P3 SSE extensions.

AMD currenly doesn not support SSE, its its a very very long wait for SSE2 on AMD.

AMD does not offer SMP, so if you want dual processors AMD is not an option.

With the new price drops, Intel is pretty damn close to price/Mhz as AMD now. so that cuts the price issue out of the equation.

Like I said before, flip back a few pages on this forum and notice all the AMD problems with incompataiblity and thermal problems.

dual processors motherboards are not that much more expensive that single versions. VP6 is nicely priced and performs good. no compatatbility issues to deal with as you can see from lack of posts from people wondering why crap dont work on it.

 

[jclw]

Unless your software takes advantage of SMP running 2 cpus won't really speed it up. I'd recommend the PIII just because I think (from my own experience and the number of posts here) that the VIA chipset used in most Athlon systems in buggy.

- JW

 

[Grizely1]

AMD does not offer SMP, so if you want dual processors AMD is not an option.

Oh, we'll only have to wait about 2 months for that

 

[Crashman]

Dual is ALMOST never worth it. It may or may not help your situation, depending on whether or not it is optimized for Dual processors. Even the, expect only about a 15% performance gain for running single applications, over the single processor. And to use dual processors in windows you'll need either NT4 or 2000.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Guest]

I disagree, software that's optimised for multithread OS will run much faster than on a single processor. An example is 3DS Max, which runs almost twice as fast on dual processors.

And the CinemCraft software is optimised for PIII Dual, so I expect an 80% increase vs a single processor.

The question is how much influence the SSE unit has. The Athlon has a vastly superior FPU, but when software is optimised for SSE, the tables turn. Figuring out by how much is the difficulty.

 

[Guest]

The software is optimised for SSE and dual. It will work very nice on Win2k

However, I'd have to run it on a VIA chipset, since there are no 815 dual boards. I'm waiting for the Asus one, if it takes too long I'll go with the MSI. If I decide on this setup over an Athlon, that is.

 

[jclw]

Acorp has a dual 815E board out. I started a post about it in the motherboard/chipset forum not long ago.

- JW

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by JCLW on 01/26/01 01:18 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[slvr_phoenix]

You must not have much experience working with multi-threaded applications.

If software is actually written (or more specifically, written well) for multi-threading, then you will see a massive performance improvement when running it with multiple processors.

Anyone who says you will only see a 15% increase in performance simply must have been running an application that was single-threaded, meaning that it could only be run on one processor. So that 15% is simply the OS and other overhead being run on one processor while the main application ran on the other one.

And indeed, most software is single-threaded. So most people won't see much, if any, noticable speed increase by using a dual processor system.

But, if you happen to know that your software was specifically designed to be multi-threaded, then you can see a massive performance increase that at best is as many times as fast as however many processors are in the system. In fact, in some cases a well designed multi-threaded application can run faster than a single-threadded application even when run on just a single CPU system simply because the CPU never gets a chance to be idle.

- Sanity is purely based on point-of-view.

 

[Crashman]

The problem here is a lack of comunication. I did not know that his particular application was written that way until he told me in the next post after mine.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[TheAntipop]

The only real reason for a home user to get a dual cpu system is bragging rights. Hell what would your friends say if you told them you had a dual Athlon-c system? They crap their pants, I know I would

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you.

 

[Guest]

Dude I don't know the answer to that. The people that have reponded to your post are talking about sh!t that has very little to do with answering your question.(I think most just don't read the post fully or are pushing some kind of opinion) Although you did ask for any input-your fault.

I am not an advocate of x posting but I think it is justified in this case. I suggest you post your problem in the software section if you haven't done so already. You might find someone who has this app. configured on different systems.

goodluck

 

[Crashman]

Whatever. He said his aplication is written for it. Yes, some aplications are. Usually these are very porcessor intensive and benifit greatly from dual processors. Most applications do not benifit at all, but some benefit greatly, so if his software can take full advantage of it, he should use SMP. I do a lot of CAD work, and some computations can take over 5 minutes when calculating forces and reaction. So you can see where more power is greatly appreciated when it can be used.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[phsstpok]

KuroNeko (sp?) implied that the software is optimized for SSE not SMP.

 

[Crashman]

Actually he indicated it was optimized for both in one of his responses-read the whole thread.

Suicide is painless...........