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AthlonXP Released
ldopa1 writes "True to form, AMD has released the new Athlon XP today. This article on Tom's Hardware has the full technical specs for the chip as well as a look at the new packaging. Tom's also has a full set of benchmarks for the chip." michael : See also reviews on LinuxHardware.org,
Newsforge,
AnandTech and AMDMB. Update: 10/09 20:29 GMT by T : gregfortune points out that AMD is giving away quite a few of these in a six-city promotion as well, so if you live in one of the six, perhaps you can snag one.
The good ol' guys at [H]ard|OCP have a review of the Athlon XP as well. It can be found here.
This isn't trickery, it's consumer educating. Back in the days of Cyrix, MHZ ment a lot more, and Cyrix was a lot less realistic than AMD is being. AMD could safely call their 1.53Ghz chip the 2000+ instead of the 1800+. With a combination of a conservative "ratin" and a very well performing chip, I think AMD will be successful with their new offering.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
AMD is now not selling thier processors as 1500MHz, but instead as 'equivilant to a P4 at 1800MHz' -> an AthlonXP 1800+
Not quite right. AMD is labeling a 1500MHz processor as equivilant to how a Pentium 1800MHz based on the coming Northwood core should perform. The Northwood core will be more efficient than the P4 architecture so an AMD AthlonXP 1800 will easily outperform a P4 1800MHz but should be roughly equivilent (better still but not by as much) to an 1800MHz Northwood.
("Thunderbird" above should be "Sledgehammer". Sorry. Considering that I'm writing this on a Thunderbird machine.)
Chip still runs on a clock, so what?
No, clock cycles do not mean anything about performance to "some talented computer users." Here's why, using CPUs other than AthlonXP and Pentium4 so as not to inflame anyone:
The old Intel 8-bit CPU used in PC/XT machines ran at 4.77 MHz (4,770,000 clock cycles per second) but this does *not* mean that it could do 4,770,000 *things* per second, because each time it needed to execute an instruction, it took several (i.e. more than one) clock cycles to do so. Furthermore, the largest numbers it could operate on natively were generally 8-bits long -- a 32-bit calculation, for example, required user code to complete, which of course meant many, many more cycles.
The Hitachi 6309 CPU of the same time period, by comparison, ran at 2.0 MHz (2,000,000 cycles per second), but was **MUCH** faster for the same types of tasks than the Intel 8-bit CPU because it could *often* finish a complete instruction in only one clock cycle and because it had 16-bit registers and a 32-bit register and could thus do MANY types of math *natively*, in just one or several cycles, that the Intel CPU needed user code (and thus, hundreds or thousands of cycles) to complete.
Because of these types of _architectural_ differences, clock cycles have little or nothing to do with the real speeds of different chips performing real-world tasks (which, for gamers, includes things like Quake 3). In fact, clock cycles and MHz are *the same thing*, as MHz on a CPU simply means "number, in millions, of cycles per second."
You will find no statistical correlation between the *actual* clock speed on an AthlonXP and each of the benchmarks vs., say, a Pentium4 at 1800 MHz. Yes, one is running at ~1,500,000,000 cycles/second and one is running at ~1,800,000,000 cycles per second, but that doesn't tell you how many cycles each one is spending doing different types of tasks or (as is often the case) sitting around waiting for data from the rest of the system or from the bus.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The previously released Athlon MP is the multiprocessor certified version of the Athlon XP. Faster versions of the Athlon MP are expected to be announced next week, with new dual processor motherboards (in addition to the Tyan Thunder and Tiger MP boards already on the market) expected next month.
The Athlon4 notebook CPUs are also equivalent to the Athlon XP desktop CPUs (with the addition of PowerNOW! power management, natch). As notebook and MP-certified CPUs are higher margin parts than uniprocessor desktop CPUs and AMD had no previous MP or notebook Athlon offerings, AMD directed their new Palamino-core fabrication lines to those markets first.
The Athlon XP uses the Palomino chipset just like the Athlon MP, so yes you can use it in an MP configuration.
For that matter you can use an Athlon tbird in an MP configuration, but the Palominos have AMD's blessing. The HardOCP article talks about this somewhat.
When you buid a new compaq computer on their website they post the speed in Mhz of the new XP chips next to the chip model.
For those of you who dont know the break down is like this:
Model 1700 - 1.47GHz / 266MHz FSB
Model 1500 - 1.33GHz / 266MHz FSB
Model 1600 - 1.4 GHz / 266MHz FSB
Model 1800 - 1.53GHz / 266MHz FSB
Well, just because the SPEC tests are awful for CPU performance measurement, doesn't mean there's any single test that's good. :)
:)
I think the only _real_ test of performance is a comprehensive set of real-world (read here: real applications!) tests. That, too, is not a test of _just_ the CPU's performance. I don't know how you'd be able to accomplish that, aside from spouting off some simulated results.
Unfortunately for the consumer, it's not possible to translate real-world performance results into a magic number that they can quickly or easily read to see how fast a system is. That's just life. People need to do research on things. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the speed difference between a 1gHz Athlon and a 2gHz Pentium IV system, anyway, so the point is moot for most people. Those of us who care about such things know where to go and what to look for when researching a computer purchase.
For full systems, a SPEC score might make a small amount of sense - then Dell could advertise their SPEC scores for each system, Gateway could for theirs, etc. But for those of us who buy on a component level, it makes no sense at all. The KT266A motherboard speed improvements over the AMD 760 chipset will probably offset those SPEC scores and let them Athlon XP 1800+ come out on top of the Pentium IV 2gHz CPU. (at least until Northwood comes out).
I guess my main gripe is that SPEC is being bandied about (even by the CPU manufacturers) as a measurement of pure CPU performance, when clearly, it is not. It's unfortunate AMD chose to publish their scores on a platform that's not the fastest. *shrug*
I'm such a nerd in that I even care about this stuff!
I'm really waiting for a DDR333 Athlon platform to come out next year. Hopefully there'll be a VIA KT333 chipset and also hopefully the Athlon 'Barton' (0.13micron Athlon platform) will have a 333mHz DDR FSB to mate to it. I've got other purchases in mind until then, assuming I ever get enough money to make them in the firstp lace.
Other guys have already told that all athlons can MP but that is not exactly true. Thunderbirds could work in a MP configuration but they did much worse than athlon MP's, sometimes even worse than single thunderbirds. So what I really wonder is how well these XPs work under SMP. I guess, since it is the same core now, there would be little or no difference in performance, but there might be issues about stability. Anyone read about XPs in SMP configuration yet?
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