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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.
Despite the fact that there is a new core which yields 3-7% more performance per clock, Tom's points out the Model Number scheme is the most interesting thing. AMD is now not selling thier processors as 1500MHz, but instead as 'equivilant to a P4 at 1800MHz' -> an AthlonXP 1800+. Is this a fair thing to do? It seems to me that it is trying to trick customers into evaluating the processors more fairly. While most slashdotters know MHz != speed, the average joe does not. I am comforted that the AthlonXP 1800+ is able to run with the P4 2GHz. AMD doesn't seem to have overhyped their processors at all.
The next topic for discussion: AMD is trying to bring together a third party instituation to rate processor speeds in some fair way. I'm sure Apple would be thrilled to jump on this bandwagon and our dear friends at Microsoft already have their hands in it.
Is that a rhetorical question? Coming in the same quarter as the Windows XP release, it seems the ties there are obvious. They want to stick with the name recognition of the Athlon, while simultaneously capitalizing on the release of Windows XP. XP, as we all know, will be the primary OS that consumers will be getting (whether by choice or not), and now they'll have an "XP" processor to go with it.
Its very sad but AMD is essentially admitting through their marketing ploy that the average consumer is incapable of realizing that the speed of a processor and indeed a system is more than a clock frequency.
Although virtually every reviewer pans the confusing processor labelling, I believe that it was a good business decision. With the success of the Athlon processor, AMD went a long way towards minimizing the marketing impact of "Intel Inside". Now they find themselves "burdened" with a processor which out performs its competitors significantly at a given clock speed. If they label the chip with its clock frequency they invite price comparisons to similarly clocked (but underperforming) Intel products.
I think the new labelling scheme is actually a win for AMD. Smart consumers will buy the chips because of their superior performance, regardless of the name. "Joe 6 pack" will buy it because he can buy the AMD 1700+ system for less than the Intel 1600.
"In 1,000-unit quantities, the Athlon XP 1800 is priced at $252. The most recent list price for a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 was $256. The Athlon XP 1700 will sell for $190, compared with $193 for a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4. The Athlon 1600 lists for $160, compared with $163 for Intel's 1.6 GHz Pentium 4. The list price for the Athlon 1500 is $130, compared with $133 for a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4."
So AMD doesn't have a significant price edge on this round. That's bad for AMD; they need a price edge to win over vendors.
Without competition from AMD, Intel CPU chips would cost around $1000. We know this because they used to cost that much. Remember when Pentium Pro CPUs cost around $1000? AMD didn't have a high-end offering back then, and Intel could get away with huge markups. That's the difference between a monopoly and competition.
The real test will come when AMD starts shipping the Thunderbird, which is not instruction-compatible with the Intel Itanium.
Has anyone heard whether or not AMD's heat problem has been solved? Reading Tom's article on what happens if your heat sink falls off really put a kink in my AMD-buying choice. I mean, it wasn't even like you had time to hit your power button - you went from 'snap' to 'smoke coming from case' in less than a second.
No matter how much faster and cheaper they are then Intel, that's a HUGE risk to take on your system.
http://kered.org
MhZ ratings mean something to me, because I enjoy tweaking the most from my system.
MHz ratings _shouldn't_ mean something to you in that case. You'd really pick a 2GHz CPU over a 1.8GHz model, even if the latter were 20% faster?
Consumers in general will be fine with this change, but geeks are going to implode. Too many have made a hobby out of tracking MHz and transistor count and other meaningless numbers. Unfortunately, it's about the same as horsepower in cars. More is not necessarily better. And no one who buys a car fixates on horsepower above all else.
You'll still know what speed your CPU runs at. It's not like it'll be a huge secret. Go in to the CPU setup on your Abit board and it'll tell you, they just hide it during boot so normal users don't see it.
Cyrix used to sell their processors with a PR-rating. PR150 which tried to compete with a Pentium 150, was actually a lower MHz.
The difference in the policy is that the Cyrix PR150 was only in _some_ applications the equal of a Pentium 150, at others (gaming) it was truly pathetic.
The AMD Athlon XP 1800+ is in almost every regard better than Pentium IV.
The conclusion is that, even though I wish AMD would market their processors on MHz, they are actually not overhyping their processors when stating in this marketing, like Cyrix did.
Just because AMD says it stands for eXtended Performance doesn't mean they aren't trying to feed off of the Windows XP hype. After all, they could have called it the Athlon EP and it would have stood for the same thing.
I think Microsoft is hurting itself by using letters instead of numbers.
If I has Windows 7 and I saw that Windows 8 is out I would feel behind the times. If I had Windows ME and I saw Windows XP is out I would not notice so much.
Customers are used to numbers. Sequels to movies have numbers. I think they will want to upgrade more with the old version scheme.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
Wow, another new CPU that current RAM and bus architectures cannot keep up with. Is it just me, or does it seem we would be better off if they just got RAM, data storage and bus speeds up to snuff so that data is able to pass between the system compotents at full blast?
This is AMD marketing trickery countering Intel engineering trickery. Intel doubled the pipeline length in the P4 versus the P3 and Athlon (20 stage versus 10 and 11, respectively) in order to crank the clock speed at the expense of performence (see The Megahertz Myth for an excellent overview on the subject). Thus why a 1.13GHz P3 will outrun a 1.4GHz P4 most of the time, and why the upgraded core of the 1.53GHz Athlon XP outruns the 2GHz P4 most of the time (for half the price).
In other words, in marketing, two wrongs make a right!
The original Athlon came out in '99. The copyright notice is probably for the Athlon name.