Petz,
On RDRAM vs. SDRAM with P4, you can say it's unfair, but P4 will always be reviewed with RDRAM (if it is faster), even if it drops to 1% of Intel sales. There was time when 820 chipset was slightly faster than BX, and it was always reviewed, even though it was a tiny percentage of the market, until Intel eventually got it's act together with 815 chipset.
TBred is supposed to have additional IPC
enhancements
I seem to recall that Tbred is just a shrink, and there seem to sources that say that it will still have 256k L2.
I expect that the MHz ramp for TBred will
more than match the Northwood until the end of the year.
I don't think Thoroughbred will ever catch Northwood. Northwood will gain 1 GHz in 1 year, and if Thoroughbred got only 666 MHz, we would need to see 2.3 GHz Thoroughbred. If that was achievable, 66 MHz will not be enough to match 100 MHz increase of NW. At some point, even 100 MHz of Tbred may not be enough to match 100 MHz of NW, mainly because of L2 cache advantage. SPECint really benefits from it. Check out P3 1.4 GHz (again with 512k L2). It slaughters Athlon 1.4 GHz, and it beats Athlon XP 1.466 GHz.
aceshardware.com
If AMD decision really is to stay with 256K L2, it is a huge mistake IMO. Athlons will start losing to NW even in application tests, which Athlon used to dominate.
Joe |
