Charles and Thread:
Athlon 800 at Sharky's
sharkyextreme.com
-Scot
some snips:
Don't be sucked in or even fooled into the whole 'MHz war'. Clock speed, whilst an important and determinant factor when comparing x86s CPUs, isn't the only issue. With different architectures being an important variable (OEMs please take note) it goes much deeper than that. For example a Pentium III with a faster frequency than an AMD Athlon has been shown to be actually slower in some cases with 3D Studio MAX under Windows NT 4.0 thanks in the most part to the strong FPU of the Athlon architecture. OEMs need to realize that looking only at the frequency of an x86 CPU simply won't suffice. Until systems are priced based on real world performance, it will still be up to us as consumers to do the research.
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Testing Quake 2 and the crusher.dm2 revealed that the Athlon's strong FPU edged it ahead of any equivalent (in terms of MHz) Intel CPU. Not only did the Athlon 800 beat the Intel Pentium III 800 by 1.7fps, but the Athlon 750 even pipped the PC-133MHz-based Pentium III 800 system.
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We've introduced this newly-released benchmark from ZD as a replacement to Winstone 99. We feel the tests here warrant attention because complex Adobe PhotoShop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6 and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge scripts are run. All of these have 'hot spots', as ZD likes to call them, that truly test the system but the CPU especially. Think of this benchmark as the "Crusher" ZD-equivalent test, which pushes real world programs to their limits (as opposed to Quake 2 timedemo1). At a score of 30.8, the Athlon 800 scored significantly higher than the Athlon 750, which came in at 28.9. Take note that the Intel Pentium III 800 came in between at 29.6.
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With WinBench 2000 having been released we got straight into the "Processor Test". It uses the "NULL" device when testing/simulating T&L routines of a 3D application. This puts a CPU's floating-point unit to work. With the Athlon's strong FPU, we expected the scores to be much more neck and neck and possibly in the Athlon's favor. Not so.
The Pentium III 800/100 significantly out-paced the Athlon 800 by a score of 1.62 to 1.42. In fact, a Pentium III 667 just about pips the Athlon 800 by .01. The newness of this benchmark leaves room for doubt that something isamiss here. We'll wait to hear from AMD and/or ZD before giving this benchmark the OK, therefor we will forgo publishing the results for now. Look for an update here soon.
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At present, the gap between Intel and AMD has narrowed so much that AMD, in some cases, now edges ahead (who'd have thought that back in 1993 when AMD began designing their own architecture?). This means that owning the fastest CPU on the block is going to get a whole lot tougher and the thrill of doing so isn't going to last much longer than the buzz you get from a morning cup of coffee. And we haven't even mentioned the 64-bit world that will be the Intel Itanium Vs. the AMD K8 x86 64-bit Sledgehammer.
The future for AMD's Athlon in 2000 looks bright. AMD processors with larger, full-speed L2 cache, 266MHz FSB and DDR DRAM support, not to mention LDT (Lightning Data Transport), all have incredible potential.
Although we've got our review unit in early, you won't be able to get one for yourselves until the New Year. The official release date as we were told, is "under embargo" so I'll quote Maximum PC on this one as they ran a story saying, "AMD expects the 800MHz Athlon to be available on January 10". Putting two and two together, the official line at SE is "we speculate mid-January".
The Texas AMD FAB (already copper-interconnect 'ready') will be the main source for the higher bin Athlons until the Dresden FAB 30 goes online and into full production (scheduled to be Q4 1999 but now rumored to be in Q2 of 2000)Unfortunately the supply may not match the demand until FAB 30 goes into full-blown production.
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