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AMD's Athlon XP 2700+
kraven_73 writes "According to some Taiwanese sources, AMD will officially reveal its Athlon XP 2700+ processor on the 7th of October. Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB. The first implementation of this increased FSB on Athlon platform. It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."
TH has this info and advice:
8 26/p4_2 800-16.html
Once again, Intel wages war on AMD, fighting to attain the fastest desktop CPU. AMD is sure to launch the Athlon XP 2800+ soon (in October at the latest), so that it will be able to keep close on the heels of its arch-rival. Intel has also made preparations of its own, with the P4/3066 up its sleeve.
At any rate, the real winner is the ambitious end user, who will be able to choose between the P4/3066 and the Athlon XP 3000+ by the time Christmas rolls around. Both the successor to the P4 and the AMD Hammer won't be available until next year.
As always, price-conscious buyers who are interested in getting the best price/ performance ratio are a bit better off with an AMD Athlon XP than with a P4..
Link here:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020
Most hardware review sites I've read commented that upping the FSB speed was the best way AMD could reclaim the speed crown...Intel regularly uses much higher FSB clocks with their chips (in the neighborhood of 533 MHz). I may be missing some crucial aspect of AMD's strategy but that seems to be what is holding them back right now, from a high-level standpoint.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Might as well wait for the Hammer.
The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Right now the AthlonXP has a FSB of 133DDR or an effective 266. Increasing this to 166DDR or 333 gives an additional 25% bandwidth. This means that the IS a point to putting DDR333 ram in an athlon MB and seeing a real performance advantage. I personaly would like to see them skip 333 altogether and go to 400. This would bring them up to one generation behind the P4 in terms of FSB bandwidth and would even out alot of the test scores that ppl are complaining about right now.
In case you have been asleep for the last year the FSB is the AthlonXP's largest bottleneck!
As for overclocking: Remember when the 266 FSB came out and ppl were complaining about the low overclock potential on the new boards? well that will happen again, but the second generation of boards will ROCK for overclocking. I have my money on boards that will handle a 400 FSB within 6 months of volume market penetration for the 333FSB.
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XML causes global warming.
Okay, let me preface this by saying I'm genuinely curious about the answer. So I'm not trying to sow the troll seeds here.
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That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for. Apart from upgrading so that you can play the immiment Unreal Tournament 2003 demo ("Only two weeks away!") and hoping to get the jump on a Doom 3 system -- what exactly are people doing with their super-high powered rigs?
I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2000+ (from a PIII), and while I sorta dug the impressive 3DMark2001SE scores (over 10,000 with a Ti4600), I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.
For gaming, yes.
But for what else? MS Word still opens in a split-second.
OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.
IE, Netscape, and Opera still open in a split-second.
And, yes, now I run Quake3 with all the settings cranked.
But this sorta of "gee whiz, that's cool" wore off in a couple of days.
Now I'm left with a pretty powerful system, but I'm at loss as to what it has actually improved. Maybe if I were doing a lot of coding, then the compilation speeds would jump significantly, but I guess since my main coding right now is writing a fairly small (only around 6,500 lines) text-adventure in INFORM, I haven't really seen the jump in compilation speeds I'd see if I were compiling hundreds of thousands of lines of code
So, I'm curious. I haven't tried NWN yet, so maybe that's the sort of high-powered cybercrank I need to get myself hooked on the slickmercury speeds of AXP 2000+ and Ti4600.
There's always the new Neocron (sp?) beta 4 out
Anyone?
The custom viewer app I wrote to moderate Autopr0n.com is still pretty slow on my duron 1.2ghz. It basicaly renders all the .jpg on a page into a back buffer so youc an flip through them quickly. It can take up to 10 seconds to decompress all the pics.
:)
So, it would be nice to get as fast a computer as I can get my hands on
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Depends what you define as a northbridge, and what you define as a FSB. The bus type (EV6, HyperTransport, whatever) is just a name for the signaling and protocol - the name of the bus itself can still be "Front Side Bus".
The "traditional" northbridge had a memory controller and an AGP controller, as well as a PCI controller. The PCI controller got moved completely off the North Bridge to the South Bridge and replaced with a proprietary interconnect in a lot of modern chips. The memory controller was moved on die, but the AGP controller is still off-die, and thus needs a chip for it. This chip could be called the "north bridge". It's just a name - AMD calls it the "HyperTransport AGP 3.0 Graphics Tunnel" (which doesn't really make much sense, as it also has a HyperTransport link to a south bridge - how does THAT relate to graphics?) but it's still a North Bridge, just without the memory controller.
There are two HT links on the system, which is why it makes sense to call it a "north bridge" and a "south bridge": there's a HT link from the CPU to the North Bridge (the AMD 8151) and a HT link from the North Bridge to the South Bridge (the AMD 8111).
So, yes, they do have a FSB, unless you want to call it something else: "highspeed HT link" and "lowspeed HT link" (for the North Bridge-South Bridge interconnect) maybe? Got me. It doesn't matter. The FSB has always been the high speed link out of the processor to a bridge chip, which then has a low speed link to another bridge chip which has all the PCI, LPC, ethernet, all that crap. Hammer doesn't change that, it just removes the memory controller from the North Bridge.
Please never utter those words again. I actually had to live through that decade -- once was enough. :P
You said it, you're an EE. Most of AMD's customers aren't and they need to sell chips. Like it or not Intel deliberately created a pipeline with too many stages so they could clock their chip high. People care about performance, AMD is telling people their chip performs like an Intel or better at some clock rate. Otherwise their customers wouldn't get it because they aren't EEs. You clearly know the real clock so there's no problem. Get over it, if AMD marketed like you suggest they might be out of business already.
I believe it was doom1 and doom2 that started the whole pentium craze in the early and mid 1990's. The 3d accelerator phase started after quake1. Todays games are old and made for late 1990's hardware. My old pentiumIII 700 with a geforce2mx can play quakeIII3 at 800 x 600 at 50 fps without a sweat. However from what I read I will be lucky to get even 2 or 3 fps for doom3 or unreal2003, even on a pIV with my video card.
My point is that people are running older software which was made for older systems. In the 1990's software was evolving faster then hardware and this is why many people hated Windows and found Windows3.1 as slow as a dog. I remember only using Windows for the world wide web and used the dos compuserve for everything else. Today its vice versa. Games and office suites mostly used today are old. Of course I am sure OfficeXP would fly on my old machine and its only games or speciality apps that would require a new systems. I bet as cd burning software gets more popular and the latest games come out, that people will once again be upgrading. Infact this might be Microsoft's only hope for OfficeXP migration. Mainly from people buying new pc's altogether.
I plan to buy one soon because I use Gentoo Linux which requires beefy hardware for its package management, as well as run UT2003.
http://saveie6.com/
Processor myth #1: AMD chips generate more heat then Intel chips.
Check the data sheets sometime, the amount of heat that an AthlonXP and a P4 put out is nearly identical. Both are also only in the 60-70W range, or about the same as your typical light bulb. We all know how turning on a single light in your house cause your AC bills to skyrocket!!!