Paul and Thread - Another Cumine 733 / i820 review vs. Athlon 700 review
gamespot.com
Excerpt:
<Coppermine outpaced the Athlon in the 16-bit GameGauge scores across the board. Some of the differences may be attributable to the more efficient throughput of the Coppermine/Camino combination. The faster L2 cache may have also played a small role, but games tend to be less cache-dependent than other applications. Finally, some of the differences were no doubt due to the roughly 5 percent clock rate difference. Still, all of it indicates the Athlon core may not be that much better than the Pentium III, as previously thought. The 32-bit game scores were somewhat inconclusive, with the Pentium III showing small, but not statistically significant, differences.
What seems to have happened is that Intel has come from behind and achieved parity with AMD. This is no doubt a relief to Intel, but it's still very significant that Athlon can stand up to Intel's latest and greatest and hold its own. Once AMD shrinks Athlon to 0.18 micron, AMD may once again have the opportunity to pull ahead. As before, AMD's biggest Achilles' heel continues to be the motherboard and core-logic chipset problems. I would have liked to run the AMD tests on a shipping off-the-shelf motherboard, but neither the FIC or Asus motherboards could complete all the benchmark tests.
The Camino-based system, despite its beta nature, has been rock solid, even with the supposed RAMBUS problems (of course, we were only using two RDRAM sockets, not all three). So stability is still Intel's strong suit - and it's not a trivial one by any means. If I were a large OEM looking to minimize support calls, I'd look long and hard before choosing an Athlon solution.
PB
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