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AMD Releases Barton: Athlon 3000+
Harle writes "Today AMD has introduced a new version of the Athlon, codenamed "Barton," that features twice as much L2 cache as previous chips. Along with the increase in L2 cache comes an increase in the Athlon's performance rating -- specifically the new 2.17 GHz chip is rated at 3000+.
The clockrate is actually slighly lower than the Athlon XP 2800+'s 2.25 GHz speed, so the question becomes "Does the cache improve performance enough to counter the loss in clockspeed?" For the most part, the answer seems to be "yes," however, it doesn't unilaterally stand up to the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4.
With the recent delay of the Athlon 64 to September, this is AMD's top desktop chip for some time to come. The reviews are starting to pop up at Ace's Hardware and Extremetech." There's also reviews on The Tech Report, SimHQ, HotHardware, EarthV, in Norwegian on Hardware.no, and last but not least AMD's press release. I'm sure there's many many more links, but I'm tired of pasting them all in here, so post 'em below. *grin*
I don't see how not selling a ridiculously overpriced CPU (the fastest P4) is going to damage them at all.
The vast majority of people don't need the P4 3GHZ, and anyone with any sense would find the current "sweet spot" in the CPU vs price tables. AMD have Intel beat all the way up to the AMD max speed, so how is Intel "kicking there ars"?
You could also say that Ferrari are kicking Ford's ass, since they make a faster car - it just doesn't work like that...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.