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.

Comments

Model Numbers

[Derkec]

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.

Re:Model Numbers

[DivineOb]

The "proper" way to compare processors would be to use the SPEC benchmarks (http://spec.org) (since they are supposed to "define" processor performance). However, AMD won't use these benchmarks use them. If we look at the highest published scores from AMD we see

Integer: 495 base, 554 peak
FP: 426 base, 458 peak

For P4

Integer: 640 base, 656 peak
FP: 704 base, 714 peak

The athlon was Advanced Micro Devic Gigabyte GA-7DX Motherboard, 1.4GHz 1 cpu
The P4 was Intel Corporation Intel D850GB motherboard (2.0 GHz, Pentium 4 processor) 1 cpu

Obviously, this isn't a totally fair match (this is the most recent numbers I could find from both on this page http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.ht ml) (there is no CPU2001 benchmarks... we'll probably stick with CPU2000 until 2005 or so... we stuck with the SPEC95 benchmarks for 5 years). The newer althonxps will have improved numbers, but the 1.4ghz part was beaten pretty badly (and those numbers came from AMD themselves, so their setup was optimal in their eyes).

Anyway, there you go

Re:AMD's heatsink problem?

[Xibby]

Umm...if you're heat sink falls off, you have one of the following problems:

You're and idiot and installed it wrong in the first place.

You're system vendor is an idiot and installed it worng in the first place.

You're motherboard is made of cheap materals

You forced something didn't you (see 1)

There is no good reason for your heat sink to just fall off.