Tong Family

Tom’s Hardware Guide CPU Guide: The Final Battle: P4/2400 vs. Athlon XP 2100 (2400 ) – Intel Pentium 4 vs. AMD Athlon XP The chapter on memory is clearly of a political nature, because ultimately, Intel has committed itself to DDR technology after RDRAM was massively boycotted by the market. With the continually increasing clock speeds, especially with the Intel platform, one thing is obvious: the single-channel DDR technology (DDR266) cannot offer enough bandwidth to achieve optimal system performance. A System with Rambus memory or dual-channel DDR helps, but the latter is certainly not in sight. So the only thing that’s left for the power user is the possibility of switching to the RDRAM platform. In any case, as our benchmark results show, DDR266 memory slows down the entire system with clock speeds of 2.5 GHz, at the very latest. Even the Pentium 4/2400, which we ran with 133 MHz FSB, showed an indisputable increase in speed when used in combination with 533 MHz RDRAM memory. Highly confidential roadmap documents, which are revealed to only the closest of partners, prove that the manufacturer will already be introducing a chipset with Dual DDR support at the end of this year. This is supposed to provide the bandwidth required for P4 CPUs with clock speeds starting from 3 GHz.