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Athlon XP1900+ -- Faster Than A 2GHz P4?
doormat writes "AMD releases their AthlonXP 1900+ Processor today, thats 1.6GHz. And it seems like its enough to topple the P4-2.0GHz, even in Quake 3 Arena!! AMDMB has a review of it." Ian Bell points out an AMD press release on the new processor. I love watching my old Athlon get slower every day ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q4/011105/index. html
Wait 20 seco....SHUTUP!
Back in the days of modems (anyone remember those?), US Robotics was a company that you could always go to when you wanted the fastest modem on the market. In a way, you could say "nobody got fired for adopting US Robotics". An ISP that selected US Robotics as their vendor knew where they were going, and they'd have the best speed. Customers would stick with that ISP because they knew that they'd have the fastest connect rates. (Okay, mind you, locked into a propriatary format and vendor.)
AMD is known for having the lowest cost. Period. Rarely ever are they more expensive than Intel. But I get confused about Athlon's strategy. They're not going to have the fastest CPUs for long periods of times, so for something like computer manufacturers, you're not going to select AMD for performance machines (even though they may currently be "on top") because you know it isn't going to last.
I suppose I'm getting far off on a tangent here, but I think AMD would be far more successful if they could continually be known for creating the best performance processor. Then, hardware vendors would be far more likely to adopt their processor and chipsets.
But I don't have my finger anywhere near the pulse of this market. Am I just plain silly?
. . . AMD lost so much street cred using that PR-rating like scheme. If they wanted to deemphasize clock speed as a measure of performance, picking "model numbers" that look a lot like clock speeds in MHz wasn't the way to honestly go about it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Here. Here. Here.
Why, oh why, do you people insist on using something like Quake as a measure for how powerful your system is?!
Because it's a benchmark that is *tangible* to most people. One doesn't get excited because a processor can do a 500x500 matrix multiply really fast, but run Q3 at 130fps and people start flipping out. Sort of like saying how fast a car can go 0-60--not that everyone is drag racing, but it's easier to understand than the amount of torque an engine puts out.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
There other reviews of this 1.6GHz processor at AnandTech and at AMD Zone and at VIA Hardware. Check them out.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Why would you be flamed? You don't know something, you ask. You'd be flamed had you talked out of your arse about XP mobo's. *grin*
The XP chips works in any motherboard based off of the VIA KT266/KT266A or SiS 735, as far as I know. I've heard scattered rumors of it working on some KT133 chipset boards, but not all. YMMV.
The KT7 won't fly at all, or won't be stable. Sorry.
I've got a KT7A-RAID myself, and the Palominos aren't supported on card revisions <1.3. I was planning to get a palomino, but I have a v1.0 board. Bleeech.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Because of a hardware issue, all KT7* motherboards before rev 1.3 will not work with XP processors. Abit has released a new bios for v1.3 and newer motherboards that give it XP support. Since you probably don't have the KT7a model, and a fairly "old" processor, I'd assume yours is a pre-v1.3 model.
Check for the rev on the motherboard to be sure. Or, if you feel lucky (or careless like I did, since I didn't read their warning at the top of the page and got the 1.3 bios since it was the top one), try flashing your board with the 1.3 compatible bios and see if it works or not. It said it wasn't compatible with my board and simply dropped back to a dos prompt. No damage done though.
See Abit's bios page for details.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
AMD Zone gives this summary at the end of its review: "No architectural or marketing changes with this release ... expect the previous CPUs to decline in price ... expect a bit higher performance and power consumption."
Anandtech agrees, saying the chip will not offer any significant extra performance over the 1800+, so early adopters need not sweat too much about being left behind. The site believes that AMD is currently the performance leader on desktop processors.
VIAHardware.com reckons users could be just as well off picking up the 1800+ at 1.53GHz and simply overclocking it to 1.6GHz. Users already owning a high-speed XP chip are better off waiting for the next upgrade on the platform to significantly increase performance.
Tech Report has some extensive benchmarking, putting the 1900+ slightly ahead of Intel's P4 2.0GHz in most of them, while SimHQ.com gets very excited about the new chip.
Amdmb.com also has a piece showing the expected five to six per cent performance increase.