AMD's New Thunderbird Articles & Benchmarks

nd writes: "The NDAs for AMD's new Athlon Thunderbird reports just expired, and the benchmarks have been pouring in. Tom's Hardware's coverage (in German) is here , a translation to English is here - Anandtech also covered the new CPU release. For those of you who want to learn more about the Thunderbird, here is an interview with AMD on the processor release. Overall, the Thunderbird is performing quite well, and will be sold at the same price as current Athlons. "

Comments

Better translation

[levendis]

Here's a far better English version of the Tom's Hardware article

Re:More information

[Acronym]

OK, this is a troll which I just fell for.

It's a malicious CGI script which makes you follow up to the article, as anyone just seeing the article (or later on surfing at -1 when we all get modded through the floor) will find out.

Frankly I don't give a damn about karma, but this is just *annoying*.

Re:More information

[Eviltar]

If you appreciate this CGI script, then you can contact the original author at zk65@hobbiton.org. You can also visit the author's web page here.

:)

DON'T CLICK THAT LINK * DON'T CLICK THAT LINK

[Black Parrot]

Skim the visible posts first. It looks like the "More Informative" link is a trap.
--

GENUINE Links for you...

[Linkmastah]

On a thread full of evil links, you can trust the Linkmastah to give you good links...

The Register is running a story that AMD have unveiled the Thunderbird.

CPU Review has a review of the Thunderbird here, and Sharky Extreme review it here.

Re:Somewhat disappointing..

[cybrthng]

Now what benchmarks actually make use and what motherboards actually support these CPU's to its fullest?

I don't think AMD's cpu's are being optimized fully by any software/driver and hardware combination yet. The world is yet still waking up from Wintel and i'm sure with more optimizations, better memory to cpu bus and better motherboards on the horizon the same chip will outperform intel counterparts.

Just my 2 pence

Tom..

[Phizzy]

..pisses me right the hell off. He makes the Thunderbird look worse by taking any chance at all, no matter how insignigicant, to point out anything this chip has against intel. Everywhere you look on thie review, the benchmark graphs show the coppermine on the new BX133 even to the Thunderbird or ahead of it, and all Tom can muster is 'Thunderbird is able to leave its predecessor as well as Intel's Coppermine behind it, as long as this processor does not run on the BX133-chipset' Yeah.. So the Thunderbird can run with the new Intel's, as long as your don't run it on the best motherboard. Now I'm as big of a fan of AMD as anyone else.. I'm about to buy an athlon in the next week or so, but Tom is totally biased against Intel and it shows in his articles. He shouldn't have to be making excuses for the Thunderbird not beating the Intel like it should, he should be showing us that it doesn't, and questioning why.

Fscking benchmarkers.

//Phizzy

Re:Tom..

[puppet10]

I agree Tom does have an AMD bias (maybe with some legitamacy recently) but this is not a symptom of it however. The reason he separates out the BX133 as being different is that this is NOT an accepted configuration by Intel, in other words it is overclocked. The closest thing to this is the Solano board which comes out behind the Thunderbird. Additionally Intel and motherboard manufacturers tell you that running a BX chipset at 133MHz is not recommended (although Tom actually has gone into detail in previous reviews on which boards can do this well).

A different point can be argued, which benchmarks should be run to measure performance. Here we can see some difference, at Sharky Extreme different benchmarks are used and slightly different conclusions are reached (Sharky's sometimes seems to bias toward Intel). However, the overall point of both is that the two chips are now basically the same in terms of performance for almost all purposes, and the Athlon is generally cheaper (and available at the moment).

(Tom) Pabst and other long-gone beers

[lbrlove]

Tom's benchmarks (as people have already pointed out) are based on an overclock, and are only valid for the overclocker. The "BX-133" is just a BX chipset overclocked to 133-MHz FSB, and thus not something that Intel or most manufacturers recommend. Typical of Intel technology, the BX is an excellent chipset that was abandoned for market reasons.

If compared on a testbed of Intel's choosing, it would be a 820 or 840 with 800MHz Rambus which lacks the performance of an overclocked BX according to general testing I have seen. Thus, the minor disparity between the Coppermine and Thunderbird in Tom's tests would likely evaporate into a strict cost or brand loyalty decision.

Basically, AMD has caught up to Intel for most practical purposes, and need only the better chipset designs to make them their equal. Some SMP sets, and perhaps better optimized single-chip sets, would be much appreciated. IMO, they have an advantage in the area of memory by not being tied to a proprietary architecture like Rambus. When DDR-SDRAM becomes widely available, AMD will unveil even more "thunder" while Intel pays their penance.

-L

Re:Athlon vs. Coppermine

[hattig]

The problem is that most software is written with Intels FPU in mind - 2 units not fully pipelined. Not 3 fully pipelined FPUs like the Athlon has. So most software won't run at full efficiency on the Athlon and it won't be getting enough instructions to keep its FPUs running full tilt. I am sure that before long games and renderers will start taking advantage though - that extra framerate could be essential!

So software that has been optimised a little for the Athlons CPU does indeed show 30% better performance!

Re:Athlon vs. Coppermine

[leiz]

There is a Linpack benchmark available http://www.aceshardware. com/Spades/read.php?article_id=156. Ace's hardware ran the test against a K7 athlon, a PIII, a celeron, and an UltraSparc II... Thunderbird kicked ass, of course, it's not exactly fair to match a 1 Gz thunderbird against a 733 PIII.


Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.

More Athalon Goodness

[Tassach]

There's an article on ZDNet that (for once) has some good information. To quote the article:

The new Athlons will be marketed under the same brand name but will be marked as "performance enhanced." AMD will offer them in speeds of 750MHz, 800MHz, 850MHz, 900MHz, 950MHz and 1GHz clock speeds. Pricing will range between $319 and $990.

And...

While the Dresden-made chips will be wired with copper, AMD said same-speed Athlons produced at the company's Austin, Texas, fab will use traditional aluminum wiring. Nothing on the products' packaging will note whether the chips, both made using the 0.18-micron process, contain copper or aluminum wiring, an AMD official said.

I'm not too thrilled about this last part, the fact that there won't be an easy way to tell the difference between an aluminium T-bird and a copper T-bird. I'd imagine that copper vs aluminium will make a big difference in terms of heat and overclockability. I would imagine that the copper T-Birds are going to run cooler and overclock higher than an aluminium chip.

I seem to recall seeing a web site somewhere that gave directions on how to decode the Athalon's serial number; and that part of the information available therein was which fab line it came off of. Does anyone have that link? Then, all I'll have to do is find a dealer who'll let me look at the serial # of the chip before I buy it. $319 for a 750MHz sounds like a sweet deal to me (The article didn't say if the prices quoted above are estimated retail or AMD's price for 1000 chip lots)

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Re:More Athalon Goodness

[Ozzy]

If you really must have a copper T-Bird, the aluminum ones have a blue die, and copper has a green die.

But, there is no difference between copper and aluminum in terms of performance or overclockability (yet! wait for 0.13uM)
see FiringSquad Review...