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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*
Why are the real life bench-mark specs always just about very theoreticial things rather than real life software? The software, if they *do* decide to test it, is usally either a MCSFT or Novell application or some other Windows-only piece of code in which the interests of us Linux folks is surely unsatisifed.
Therefore I really encourage these producers like AMD to start benchmarking Linux applications for their new procs. For example, run a %top instance and then run a few different programs: for example 1) a C++ app... 2) a JAVA app... 3) and perhaps a compile of the Linux kernel (2.2x series though, not 3.x).
That would indicate a great deal of things including thruput and FSB calculations as well as hard disk access times in conjunction with a fast CPU.
We want to no what we're getting here so don't give us QUAKE III marks, give us Linux benchmarks that reflect real life computer code!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Entirely fair? This chip gets BITCHSLAPPED by the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz chip.
When AMD started off this stupid arse made up numbers, they were slightly better than a similar P4, but now they are way worse, so they are starting to look stupid.
Here's to hoping AMD drops this false advertising and goes back to clock speed. At least then they aren't pretending the chip is something it's not.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur