On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 09:23 -0500, Chris Peikert wrote:
I use AMD chips all the time. To my understanding of how AMD chips work AMD calls it a 2500 because its suppose to be equal to an INTEL chip that runs as 2500 even though the actual clock shows it slower. They started doing that with the XP chips which Sempron replaced.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Geis Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 9:14 AM
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Good Grief! And I thought I was always the last to know! Chris is right. But the change occurred around 1997 (8?) or so? About 10 yrs ago? It was because the average consumer only knows MHz as the performance indicator and is not aware of pipelines, on-board cache, instruction sets, multiple decode, predictive ...
So AMD needed a way that could immediately clue the clueless that this was "approximately equal to Intel at xxx MHz". It worked ... sorta. They took a lot of heat about it from the old-guard tech types. But they managed to avoid bankruptcy and are still bringing superior products to market.