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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."

39 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. It's also the last 32 bit Athlon. by Pop+n'+Fresh · · Score: 5, Informative
    "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

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    *This page intentionally left pointless*
    1. Re:It's also the last 32 bit Athlon. by ryszards · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      - 'sup, G?
  2. Oh man...winter just ended... by MeanE · · Score: 5, Funny

    and I already had bought a space heater.

    1. Re:Oh man...winter just ended... by Schezar · · Score: 4, Funny

      You know, AMD procs don't have the heat problems they used to have. If they overheat your case, it's usually due to a poorly made case or some other factor. Like, say, a modern video card... -_-

      --
      GeekNights!
      Late Night Radio for Geeks!
  3. poor AMD by MacOS_Rules · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...compete with Intel's "yang"...

    Poor AMD, releasing a faster proc just because they feel...inadaquate...

    I bet they drive SUVs too. A shame, really.

    --
    If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business. -Thackeray, William
  4. Athlon rating system over-rated? by Imabug · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Based on what I've read of the 3200+ at Tom's Hardware and Tech Report, the CPU performance is good, just slightly better than the 3000+, but still gets trumped by the P4 3.0 and 3.06 CPUs. Both call into question the validity of AMD's CPU rating system, and judging from their benchmarks, rightly so. The 3200+ is also supposed to be more expensive than the P4s, which combined with the dissapointing performance may limit it's popularity.

    It will be interesting to see how the 3200+ performs when overclocked.

    --
    "For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
    1. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by Psiren · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by turgid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, say intel used a performance rating to compare the P4 to a PIII, and took the 1GHz PIII as the baseline. Since the Pentium 4 does a lot less per clock cycle than the PIII, they'd probably have to call their P IV 3.0GHz a "P IV 2300+" or something.

    3. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by Psiren · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course, they don't have to, since they've got the fastest chip on the block.

      Yep, they have. But I find it interesting that if both chips were running the same true clockspeed, the AMD would be faster. It leads me to believe that Intel rely far more on being able to ramp up their clockspeed than they do on creating a better chip. For that reason alone I prefer AMD.

    4. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by ViGe · · Score: 2, Funny

      Completely useless marketing crap. Why not at least make it amusing, and set the base really really low. E.g. the Athlon 40,000,000+, where the baseline is an Intel 8086 running at 4Mhz.

      Have you ever really tried overclocking an Intel 8086 to 3Ghz? It actually is pretty fast, but as it does not have any protected modes as they arrived in the 386, the only OS it can run is DOS. The dir command however is pretty fast.

      --
      It has to work - rfc1925
    5. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 2, Informative
      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.

    6. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by wbattestilli · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by IWannaBeAnAC · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Well, until a year or two ago the Intel approach was undeniably the winner. That is how they managed to get to be king of the hill in the first place. But for sure, branch prediction has huge theoretical limits. Consider:

      while (1) { if (rand() % 2) foo(); else bar(); }

      How do you branch-predict that? Beyond simple for-loops (predict correctly N times in a row, predict wrong exactly once at the end of the loop) it gets very difficult.

      But branch-prediction is only one part of the total pipeline performance, and you are arguing the wrong way anyway. Overall, it is the slower clock speed processors where pipelining is more important. In these processors you need to make sure the pipeline is full to get more operations per clock, to compensate for the slower clock speed. At 3GHz, it doesn't matter much if your code doesn't pipeline very well. At 500MHz, it is critical. That is why pentiums are such good general purpose processors, and why Itanium sucks.

      I agree with you that they now play the thug to stay on top (burying alpha, doing a huge con job with Itanium etc etc).

    8. Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? by ponos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      >special interests have corrupted
      >mainstream benchmarks to make them an
      > unusuable guide.

      This is true, to a certain extent!
      People used to benchmark with, say,
      Office scripts or other "office" jobs.

      Most modern benchmarks are almost
      100% multimedia (Internet content
      creation, Divx, MP3 photoshop etc
      come to mind). This is very convenient
      for Intel because P4 is a multimedia
      design (long pipes, high MHz, small
      cache, fast FSB, SSE2) designed for
      serial operations (small loops, no
      branches) with huge data sets (fast
      memory is good here).

      The Athlon is a completely different
      design and it cannot compete. I am
      really wondering how it performs e.g.
      with kernel compiles or other
      system scripts.

      Anyway, this reminds me of the situation
      with K5 and Quake. Until the era of
      Quake (and Pentium Classic) all
      competing processors (AMD K5, K6,
      Cyrix) had very very slow FPUs.

      Quake was the first widespread game
      to use FPUs (it relied on the FPU to
      compute 1/z with fdiv) and even though
      the K5/K6 were VERY fast with integer
      code the Pentium Classic had vastly
      superior performance under Quake
      (popular benchmark at the time!).

      Anyway, this whole situation is not
      necessarily the fault of the benchmark
      designers. Frankly, even though the
      AMD may be faster at e.g. Excel I don't
      intend to use huge multi-megabyte
      spreadsheets (most of us don't) but
      I do intend to use MP3/MPEG2 etc
      algorithms for which (like Internet
      Content Creation) the P4 may be
      a better choice for those that can
      afford it.

      Actually I do own an Athlon 2200+
      and I am very pleased with its
      performance mostly (and most
      importantly) because it is CHEAP.

      (AMD always has better MIPS/FLOPS
      per $, that's why I buy AMD)

  5. Re:Overkill by afidel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There are plenty of uses for fast cpu's that don't involve bloated software, hardware synthesis (ask Xylinx about it), media encoding and creation (software music synths are cpu hogs), high detail 3D visualization, genetic algorthims, etc. These are all apps I have used either professionally or recreationally (or both) and they all will have no problem scaling to any cpu based on moving electrons.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  6. Better benchmarks.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
  7. Finally! by The-Bus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Excellent, now I will finally be able to upgrade the chip on my homemade iLoo.

    --

    Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

    1. Re:Finally! by Schezar · · Score: 2, Funny

      " Excellent, now I will finally be able to upgrade the chip on my homemade iLoo."

      I had a cow chip. I was happy with it before, but I don't think it will cut it anymore when Doom ]|[ hits the shelves.

      I was thinking of going with the new Intel "Dungbeetle" core, but I've heard it has heat issues.

      --
      GeekNights!
      Late Night Radio for Geeks!
  8. Tom's Hardware: Paper tiger by geschild · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
    --
    Karma? What's that again?
  9. Re:System Recomendation by Surak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gigabyte makes a nice 400 FSB board, the G7VAXP has on board 10/100 LAN and awesome audio with SPDIF support. Abit makes a similar board with gigabyte ethernet, I believe.

    Personally, I never buy a new chip when it first comes out. I always stay behind a generation or too, that's the sweet spot in terms of bang/$.

  10. Re:What if we really got 3.2GHz from AMD by gilesjuk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They use the marketing to show that their chips perform similar to Intel ones even though they're at a lower clock speed. Intel's P4 is designed to clock high and need to be clocked high as it can't do as much per cycle as the AMD.

    Imagine the situation where car buyers only looked at the CC of the engine to determine how fast it would go, the AMD car would be a 2 litre but the Intel car would be 2.8 or something. So buyers would choose the Intel. Except the Intel engine has 4 cylinders and the AMD has 6 etc...

  11. And it is brown! by leuk_he · · Score: 3, Informative


    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

  12. Re:Overkill by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    well if you want comparisons....

    we just bought some Dell 2.2ghz P-4 laptops here to replace some aging and damaged laptops.. what they are replacing are P-III 800 laptops.

    All of them run W2K and the users are NOT feeling a speed difference. Yes some of the processor intensive apps are fast. the winstone tests show it's faster.. but word processing and internet does not get a speed increase.

    So in conclusion of my findings I also reccomend to EVERYONE to not upgrade their computer unless they absolutely have to. If you own a P-III that is 800mhz or higher, you will not see any difference unless you are a power user or a gamer.

    It's just silly to spend money for the sake of spending it. as soon as we get a magnitude of speed change that will be very noticable (read that as SCSI like hard drive speeds... IDE is too damn slow) it is a waste of time and money to upgrade like we did 2 years ago and earlier. there are no real performance and quality changes (except for downgrade in quality)

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  13. Re:System Recomendation by ilsie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Um, no. The Gigabyte G7VAXP may have a VIA KT400 northbridge on it, but it can not actually do 400 FSB with sync memory.

    The only motherboard currently on the market that officially (as in, official support) does 400 FSB is the Asus A7N8X rev 2.0, with Nvidia's NForce2 chipset.

  14. Realtime physics by mmol_6453 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One game: Software rendered Doom III. :)

    Well, that may not be practical, but consider this: Game interactivity could gain massive boost of any sort of fluid model was used; Watch all the windows in a building get blown out when some idiot throws a grenade. Another example would be mass-spring systems for solids. Ever want to take out a load-bearing wall in a building map? Or cause a cave-in?

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    What's this Submit thingy do?
  15. Multimedia apps need lots of CPU power by MtViewGuy · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  16. Re:Overkill by Micro$will · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  17. Re:Overkill by mmol_6453 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Considering the tech sector was the hardest hit? And tech people without jobs are more likely to spend time on Slashdot?

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    What's this Submit thingy do?
  18. From the article... by fok · · Score: 5, Funny

    The AMD Athlon(TM) XP processor with performance-enhancing cache memory features 64K instruction and 64K data caches for a total of 128K L1 cache and 512K of integrated, on-chip L2 cache for a total of 640K of full-speed, on-chip cache.

    So... will I be able to run MS-DOS programs directly from the processor cache? ;D

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    \m/
  19. Biased benchmarks by edxwelch · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  20. Wow by Wordsmith · · Score: 4, Funny

    "This CPU runs with a 400MHz Front Side Bus at 2.2GHz ..."

    Now -that's- overclocking.

  21. gratis feature? by MoreDruid · · Score: 2, Funny

    will the seat be heated to the point that you can't sit down anymore? Or will you use "flush cooling"?
    Inquiring minds want to know :)

    --
    The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
  22. Re:System Recomendation by Hoser+McMoose · · Score: 2, Funny

    If you're reading Tom's Hardware once every few months (for a quick laugh), then you're reading it at least as much as you should! :>

    On the other hand, if you haven't already done so, you should read Tom'z Hardware Bible!

  23. Re: Nope.... Inclusion by lars_stefan_axelsson · · Score: 2, Informative
    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. ;-)

    --
    Stefan Axelsson
  24. Re:What if we really got 3.2GHz from AMD by fmaxwell · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  25. Re:Overkill by kardar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I upgraded a 750mhz Duron to a XP 1700+ ; same everything, just a different jumper for the front side bus.

    I could tell the difference, but mainly in things like how fast it does a seti work unit; with browsing and word processing, I agree, it's a little more difficult to tell. Big software applications open up a little faster, things compile faster, but web surfing and word processing, yes, it is hard to notice an obvious difference. It's nice to have a little extra power if you need it, though.

  26. Bajillion Ultra Hertz! by nick_davison · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, the logic behind AMD's naming structure was that, while their cores ran slower, their names gave you an idea of what speed a comparable Intel chip would run at. That meant a 2000+, while running significantly slower, produced about the same output as a 2GHz Pentium, etc.

    Now they have the 3200+ which runs... well a bit slower than the 3Ghz Pentium. It also runs at a 2.2Ghz core. So nowhere in any of its design does it really justify a 3200+ moniker. 3000+ is closer with 2950+ possibly being the most accurate, according to the benchmarks.

    If the n+ meaning has nothing to do with real world speeds, core speeds, relative speeds or any other kind of speed anymore, why don't they stop worry and just get on with calling it the "Bajillion Ultra Hertz!" model (note the important exclamation marks)?

    You know, I need to get myself a V8+ sticker for a Pinto.

  27. If you're gonna use car analogy... by splerdu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...at least get it right!

    MHz = operational speed, aka RPM. Not CC
    Since Intel's P4 is does less work per cycle, it's like a small displacement engine working at high rpm. AMD's Barton is like a large engine working at lazier, lower revs.

  28. Re:What if we really got 3.2GHz from AMD by fmaxwell · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.