Computer Technology -Computer Education - Pc Blog

AMD Phenom vs. Athlon Core Shootout

Is Phenom Really Faster Than Athlon?

AMD removed the core count suffix X2, X3 and X4 from the logo and changed its nomenclature instead: 9000 models have four cores, while the upcoming triple cores have a 7000 model number.

AMD has had a difficult year. Not only did the long anticipated Phenom processor arrive at considerably lower clock speeds than expected (2.3 GHz instead of 3 GHz), but the current stepping of the so-called Barcelona core is afflicted with a nasty bug. While there are workarounds for it, only an updated stepping will allow AMD to resume quad core processor deliveries in the server segment. The fact that the quad core doesn’t deliver sufficient performance to attack Intel at the high-end doesn’t help either. As a consequence of these problems, AMD has had to readjust its product strategy, and position the processor together with the new Spider platform in the mainstream. Despite all of the issues, though, Phenom isn’t as bad as it may appear, as our comparison between the Phenom and the Athlon 64 X2 shows.

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What is PATA - SATA - NCQ ?

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Next-generation Serial ATA products promise to double hard drive interface performance from 1.5 to 3 gigabits per second
(Gbits/sec) and possibly beyond,providing a ten-year performance roadmap for OEMs and channel system builders.But is SATA
3Gb/s technology necessary across both the host and drive interface to deliver maximum data throughput for today’s storage
environments?
For host interfaces,the 3-Gbits/sec speed is necessary to meet the increasing performance requirements for bandwidth-intensive
applications,such as IT and corporate data centers,health care service,manufacturing and financial real-time systems,and nearline
data storage,as the amount of data that companies need to store,manage and keep readily available continues to increase.Serial
ATA can help meet rising data throughput needs by doubling the speed of the data delivery path,enabling the transfer of more than
1.5 gigabits of data in aggregated arrays and other multi-drive configurations.From the host side,SATA 3Gb/s essentially provides a
larger pipe to move more data.
Benchmark tests today show that in multi-drive configurations,SATA 1.5Gb/s disc drives can reach data transfer speeds of greater
than 200 megabytes per second (Mbytes/sec) when their individual maximum data transfer rates are aggregated into a single pipe
to the PC or server host.Keep in mind the individual drives may be comparatively lower,but the array performance is limited only by
the number of drives in the array and by the speed of the underlying host interface rate.For the best performance,large numbers of
drives can be connected and their data aggregated into a larger host interface.
Multiple drives connect to a SATA 1.5Gb/s or SATA 3Gb/s Port Multiplier.The collective drive data rate with the SATA 3Gb/s Port
Multiplier equals 240 Mbytes/sec into the host controller.By contrast,the collective drive data rate in a single-drive environment
would be around 60 Mbytes/sec.