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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (68558)	8/11/1999 3:24:00 PM
From: Bruce A. Thompson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577091

From: +richard surckla Wednesday, Aug 11 1999 2:58PM ET Reply # of 26930 Athlon trades in price for performance A PC a system based on the new Athlon may outperform one based on Intel's Pentium III by around 14 percent, but the Athlon system mainboard alone may cost three times as much as that of a Pentium III board. According to performance results just published by Mercury Research, a PC built around the new Athlon processor from Advanced Micro Devices scored up to 14 percent higher than an identically-configured system based on Intel's Pentium III, according to performance results just published by Mercury Research. The results can be found on The Meter, a web site published by Mercury Research, beginning today. The address is www.themeter.com. The test systems were assembled one at a time by Mercury Research so the exact same components could be used in the tests, thereby eliminating any bias. Only the processors and system mainboards were changed. In both cases, Mercury Research used 600-MHz processors with 128 Mbytes of memory and a Dynamite TNT2 Ultra graphics card from Hercules. Mercury Research (www.mercuryresearch.com) is a US research and consulting firm that is dedicated to providing unparalleled depth and insight into the markets for PC components and related hardware. Founded by experts in the field, Mercury Research publishes reports on a variety of critical technologies, including graphics components, processors and chip sets, and sound chips. According to industry sources, Eurotrade has learned that AMD's pricing strategy appears to be a bit lower than Intel's Pentium III processors at the 500 MHz entry level, and a bit higher at the 600MHz level. But the price difference is really negligible when you compare that with the difference in system board prices. At the end-user level, fresh Athlon-support boards from Taiwan's Micro-Star International and Giga-Byte are almost three times as much as that for Pentium III boards of similar configuration, checking in at a around hefty USD225/piece. However, as Silicon Integrated Systems and Acer Labs join VIA Technologies is providing less costly chipsets to board manufacturers, system board prices are expected to drop somewhat, when and if AMD provides enough Athlons to the market to justify volume production of the system boards in Taiwan. The AMD Athlon family is designed to deliver unprecedented performance for cutting-edge commercial and consumer software applications running on high-end desktop systems, workstations, and servers. The AMD Athlon processor is available in speed grades of 650, 600, 550, and 500 MHz. At 650MHz, the AMD Athlon is the world's fastest x86 processor. The AMD Athlon processor's seventh-generation microarchitecture, superscalar floating point engine, and high-bandwidth, 200MHz system bus enable it to achieve performance levels never before attained by an x86 processor. The AMD Athlon significantly outperforms previous-generation processors, such as Intel's Pentium(r) III product family, and delivers the highest floating point, integer, and 3D multimedia performance for x86 system platforms. Superior floating point performance: Clock for clock, AMD Athlon processor-based systems deliver significantly better floating point performance than comparably configured Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon systems, according to the SPECfp_base95 and Ziff-Davis 3D WinBench 99 FPU WinMark benchmarks. For example, a 550MHz AMD Athlon processor has more than 35 percent higher performance than either a 550MHz Pentium III or a Pentium III Xeon on the SPECfp_base95 benchmark. Superior integer performance: AMD Athlon processor-based systems outperform comparably configured Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon systems on a variety of integer benchmarks, including SPECint_base95 and Ziff-Davis Business Winstone 99 on Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0. Clock for clock, the AMD Athlon processor outperforms the Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon, according to BAPCo's SYSmark benchmark for Windows NT 4.0. Superior 3D multimedia performance: AMD Athlon processor-based systems deliver clearly superior 3D performance when compared to comparably configured Pentium III systems, according to leading 3D benchmarks, such as Ziff-Davis 3D WinBench 99 v1.2 (Null Driver and Transform & Lighting versions) and FutureMark's 3DMark(TM) 99 MAX (3DMarks and CPU 3DMarks).