Athlon Xp 3200+ 400FSB is Coming

SoDaLaS writes "Athlon 3200+ Coming: According to CNET The Athlon 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB is on the way in the next two weeks. It'll be interesting to see how well the processor overclocks at that high of a bus speed...it didn't seem to hamper the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4, which many people were worried about too."

Comments

400 MHz, 800 MHz

[Gothmolly]

Lets make sure we're comparing apples to apples. The 400 MHz bus on the Athlon is a DDR doublepumped bus, so its really 200 MHz. The 800 MHz FSB on the P4 is a quadpumped bus, so its really 200 MHz.

Re:400 MHz, 800 MHz

[GigsVT]

Yes, but calling it "Mhz" is misleading. That's like saying the PCI bus runs at 1056Mhz because it is 32 lines running at 33Mhz.

We already have enough misleading and confusing computer terms, we don't need to add another one.

Overclocking

[sigep_ohio]

Unless they shrunk the Athlon core, I don't see a lot fo room for overclocking. The 3000+ isn't an overclocking dream, so simply moving to a faster bus ain't gonna make the 3200+ any better.

Re:Overclocking

[Maverick2219]

The thing with overclocking usually isn't to get the newest, and fastest CPU and then overclock the hell of it. It's to get something in the midrange and then overclock. For instance, when the Barton core was first released you didn't see curious overclockers buying 3000+ parts to overclock, no they (myself included) purchased the 2500+ part at a savings of roughly $400. I can overclock my 2500+ up to what SiSoft Sandra says is 3200+ performance specs with very little noise a-la my watercooling system. I needed a watercooler anyway due to the high temperatures in the summer in my room, and guess what? It's completely stable. People won't buy the 3200+ CPU's en mass to overclock them, but they will buy the boards updated to run the 400Mhz bus so that they can overclock their old 266 and 333Mhz bus CPU's in a more stable environment.

Re:Overclocking

[fobbman]

I'm going to assume that you are trolling, but as I'm an angler myself I can appreciate a good set of inline blades.

What I don't think you understand about the CPU business is that when Intel, AMD, whomever makes CPUs, they make them without knowing which one will end up going what speed. It's not until they test them that they find out, and then they put them into a bin based on the max speed they run.

Well, let's say that they have a good run and they get 60% of them to go at 3000+ speeds, with the rest waterfalling down from there. That's great, but the market isn't demanding a bunch of 3000+ chips. Turns out the big push is for, say, 2400+ chips. So, to fill those orders they set many of those faster chips to run at the 2400+ speeds via the cutting of bridges.

Why not just release all those 3000+ chips at 3000+ speeds? Profit, dear troll, profit. If they flooded the market with those higher-priced chips, then the price would go down. Better to make a large profit on those fewer faster chips.

At least, that's how I understand it.

Make up your own shit, you wanker

[Doctor Sbaitso]

From HardOCP [H]ardNews 6th Edition posted on Wednesday April 30th, 2003:

Athlon 3200+ Coming:
The Athlon 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB is on the way in the next two weeks, according to C|Net. It'll be interesting to see how well the processor overclocks at that high of a bus speed...it didn't seem to hamper the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4, which many people were worried about too.

The last Athlon XP

[Jungle guy]

Acording to my sources, this should be the last Athlon XP to be released by AMD. Their next desktop processor will probably be Athlon 64, wich will need a different motherboard.

So my advice is for not buying a computer with Atlhon XP 3200, as your upgrade roadmap will be locked. It is better to buy a computer with a slower (and cheaper) Athlon, and wait untill the price drop to buy an Atlon XP 3200. Or wait for the release of Athlon 64 - it will be an excelent computer for video edition, 3D rendering and games like Unreal Tournament 2003 or Doom III.

Today vs Yesterday

[nuggz]

10 Years ago you could do internet/email/word processing/spread sheets with just a 33MHz Intel 386 with 16 MB RAM. Today you need for the very same things a Pentium IV with 2 GHZ and 128 MB RAM.

I still use my p133 for many tasks, irc, email and personal server.

Web browsing on a 386/33, never did it, I had a 386/40. It was VGA (640x480 w16 colours), It was slow, the pages were simple. It was the only thing I could do at the time.

Now I browse with many windows, 24bit colour at higher resolutions (rarely anything as pathetic as 1024x768).
I can play mp3's without skipping a beat, along with movies. I was glad to get a .mod playing on my 386 without skipping.

We've come a long way, we do have overkill for many applications, but it isn't all waste. I think too many people who complain aobut how excessive it is today forget how relatively wimpy it was before it became mainstream.

Does anyone else remember how cool it was to have a 486 that would dir a directory listing faster then you could read it?

MHz is already meaningless

[TexVex]

AMD CPUs outperform Intel CPUs at similar frequencies. That's why AMD stopped marketing their processors based on their frequency. In some benchmarks, an Itanium running at 900 MHz outperforms 3 GHz Pentium IVs. Once upon a time, before clock multiplying, MHz meant more than it does now. But even in the 8-bit days, a 6502 running at 1 MHz would perform similarly to an 8086 running at 4.3 MHz.