AMD Athlon 800MHz CPU - Page 1/8
Review Date: January 25, 2000
Reviewer: Heidi Monson
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AMD has been taking processor market share from Intel, and now owns nearly 20 percent. The top end product, Athlon, is the primary reason. Now, the battle has heated up even further with the introduction of the 800 megahertz processors by both AMD and Intel. In this review, we take a look at the Athlon 800, including several benchmarks, and compare it with AMD's previous entry, the Athlon 700.
Background
One of the most remarkable things noted about the Athlon 800 is how cool it runs. If you read Scott Wainner's review of the Athlon 700, then you are aware that the Athlon 700 does not run hot, negating early AMD history with the K6, K6-2, and K6-3 series, noted for the heat they produce. The 800, though is just plain amazing. After running constantly for 48 hours, it was nearly cool to the touch! The reason lies in manufacturing using a 0.18 micron process--unlike previous versions produced with a 0.25 micron process--resulting in lower power requirements. This process was introduced with the Athlon 750, and currently all Athlons from 550 through 800 are produced on the improved manufacturing system.
The L2 cache in earlier Athlons runs at half the speed of the processor. For example, in the Athlon 500, the L2 cache runs at 250MHz, and in the Athlon 700, it runs at 350MHz. However, because the supply of cache RAM is currently limited, AMD has opted to keep the speed of the L2 cache at only 325MHz. In theory, the Athlon 800 should run 12.5 percent faster than the 700 [(800 - 700) / 700], but the relatively slower L2 cache would imply less improvement. Our benchmarking, reported on later in this article, shows that a 12.0 percent gain in speed does exist, indicating only a minor hit in performance.
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