AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Released

SpinnerBait writes "AMD took the wraps off their next speed bump with the Barton core, the Athlon XP 3200+. This CPU runs with a 400MHz Front Side Bus at 2.2GHz and is targeted at competing toe to toe with Intel's latest P4. The benchmarks and review over at HotHardware, look pretty good but Intel's 3GHz/800MHz FSB P4 variant seems to squeak past it here and there. Regardless, more of that "yin" to compete with Intel's "yang" was released today by AMD and consumers will benefit again from the competition."

Comments

What if we really got 3.2GHz from AMD

[alta]

Wouldn't that be great! Damn fast! Come one AMD, drop the marketing and make it run at 3.2G!

Re:What if we really got 3.2GHz from AMD

[fmaxwell]

Anyone who knows much about cars, knows piston displacement really doesn't mean shit, put it on a dyno and see how an engine really performs.

How many engines have you built? I've built a few and I know that greater displacement on normally aspirated engines usually leads to higher torque at low RPMs. Low displacement usually equates to lower torque and that the only way to make lots of horsepower from low-displacement is to design the engine for high RPMs -- because horsepower = (torque[lb.-ft.] * RPM)/5250. That's why a 1 liter motorcycle engine can produce upwards of 140 horsepower but would be completely unsuitable for powering a sedan that does fine with a 140 horsepower, large-displacement engine.

Re:What if we really got 3.2GHz from AMD

[fmaxwell]

A 1.0L motorcycle engine would power a sedan just fine. Just make sure you gear it down low enough.

Untrue. The area under the torque curve very much influences the driveability of an automobile engine. If you have a peaky engine, such a 1-liter motorcycle engine, the powerband is insufficiently narrow to be used in a car, regardless of gearing.

Gearing the car down low will provide you adequate off-the-line performance, but what happens when you shift from first to second and your engine speed drops out of the peaky powerband? Answer: The engine bogs down.

Want another example? An OS model airplane engine that displaces only 9.95 cubic centimeters produces 1.8 horsepower at 16,000 RPM. That's with .2hp of the maximum allowed for mopeds. But do you think that the 3.3 inch long model airplane engine could power a moped? Of course not. It has too narrow of a powerband.

It's also the last 32 bit Athlon.

[Pop n' Fresh]

"AMD took the wraps off their next speed bump with the Barton core, the Athlon XP 3200+."

It's also going to be the LAST speed bump with the Barton core. AMD's next Athlon is going to be 64 bits:

http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-1001106.html?tag =fd_lede1_hed

Re:It's also the last 32 bit Athlon.

[ryszards]

There will be other 32-bit Athlon's, 'Thorton' for one, a return to 256KB L2 when Athlon64 hits to turn the 32-bit range into the Athlon64's Duron equivalent.

They might not get any faster, but there will be more.

Better benchmarks....

[Anonymous Coward]

Here

Tom's Hardware: Paper tiger

[geschild]

Tom's Hardware isn't so positive in their review. Quote from the conclusion:

"XP 2800+ would have been a more realistic label for the processor, which wouldn't have been a problem for anyone, if AMD still wants to go toe-to-toe with Intel's P4."

Oh well, the old adagium for benchmarks/statistics aplies I guess.

Re:Athlon rating system over-rated?

[Psiren]

Both call into question the validity of AMD's CPU rating system

Unofficially perhaps, but officially the comparison isn't to Intel chips, but to AMD's older Thunderbird processors. A 3200+ is supposed to give about the same performance a tbird would, if it was clocked to 3.2GHz.

And it is brown!

[leuk_he]

HEXUS reckons a 200MHz front side bus can't hurt. here. There's a picture of a brown semiconductor, also known as the "brains of a computer".

TOM'S HARDWARE has a controversial conclusion about the 3200+ and describes it as a "spineless paper tiger". It thinks the 3200+ is "much too aggressive" and it should be an XP2800+.


SUDHIAN Some crazy looking geek at Sudhian (hi Joel), reckons that AMD is being a little coy with clock speeds while its PR speeds have rocketed skywards.


FIRING SQUAD says AMD's odyssey for the performance crown has been a little more treacherous than Her Indoors, but welcomes the introduction of the 3200+ and the 400MHz bus.


TECH REPORT says there's not much new to report about the 2.2GHz chip apart from the fact that it runs on a 400MHz front side bus. But it reckons that the release is timely. There's a picture of a brown semiconductor which appears to resemble the brains of a computer.


LOST CIRCUITS contrasts the real brown brains of a computer with the hypothetical 3200+ brains of a computer it previewed a month or two ago.


BIT-TECH reckons that AMD's finally released the processor that the 3000+ should have been, denies the site's too pro-Intel, and puts it through its paces. There's a picture of a brown chip which appears to be the brains of a computer.

I stop whoring now, more to be found at amdzone

Re:And it is brown!

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you should consider linking to the page you took it from... The Inquirer

Multimedia apps need lots of CPU power

[MtViewGuy]

I think people are starting to find out that multimedia applications such as still-image processing, audio editing and video editing does require serious amounts of CPU power if you want anything done reasonably quickly.

Take for example Adobe Photoshop. The Photoshop LE edition that comes with some software CD-ROM discs included with your new digital camera may not have all the doodads of the full version of the program, but it still uses a lot of CPU power to do things like creating special effects for your pictures or to correct things like removing red eye, removing power lines, sharpening the clarity of background objects, etc.

Video editing is another program that really uses a lot of CPU power. After downloading your home videos from your MiniDV and MicroDV cameras, the editing process is quite complex and takes a lot of CPU power to create a final edited home video that you can burn onto a recordable CD or DVD disc.

Re:Overkill

[Micro$will]

I agree with you totally, especially with laptops, but have you looked into other factors, like some of the useless junk OEMs like to put in the disk images? The first thing I do with a new computer is fdisk/format/reinstall and eliminate all the cruft.

Another issue is all the power saving features on Intel *-m processors tends to lag it down a lot. Just uncompressing the Linux kernel at boot takes a lot longer on my PIII-m 933 Thinkpad than it does on my old PIII 600E home machine.

Re:Athlon rating system over-rated?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Because Intel found that the best way to improve overall performance is to increase the clock speed, even at the expense of making the per-clock performance worse.

They are right too: where has almost all of the increases in performance come from? Not from doubling the number of instructions processed per clock every 18 months, that is for sure.

Biased benchmarks

[edxwelch]

I've just been reading this: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9445 Very interesting claims about the validity of certain benchmarks. According to the inquirer the PC World bencharks are the only ones to be trusted. Also quite interesting what they are saying about how consumers have been ripped off for buying Celerons.

Re:Athlon rating system over-rated?

[wbattestilli]

I have long suspected that the industry standard benchmarks have gotten a bit crazy in the past year. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9445 does a pretty good Job sumarizing my thoughts. The benchmarks don't add up. Last year's WinWhatever benchmarks give totally different results than this year's, even on new hardware. I actually think that AMD is *trying* to be genuine with their rating system, but I also think that special interests have corrupted mainstream benchmarks to make them an unusuable guide.

Re: Nope.... Inclusion

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Everything that is present in each of the L1 caches is also present in the L2 cache.

Not on the AMD, which has an exclusive cache.

So it's the MS-DOS and application executing completely on chip. Someone post benchmarks please. ;-)