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

To: crazyoldman who wrote (114171)	6/4/2000 11:04:00 PM
From: Mani1	Respond to of 1575780

Thunderbird at 700 MHz is selling like hot cake at HSN hsn.com Hottest selling item.. Just got back from New Orleans, all I can say is that southern hospitality and awesome Cajun and Creole food is all it's cracked up to be :) Mani

To: crazyoldman who wrote (114171)	6/4/2000 11:04:00 PM
From: milo_morai	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575780

Anand Highlights anandtech.com Before the introduction of the Thunderbird, the 1GHz Athlon was pretty much tied with the 1GHz Pentium III under Content Creation Winstone 2000. Now with the release of the Thunderbird we see a slight advantage tossed to AMD although the performance improvement we're measuring here isn't all that great at all. We have a number of different platforms present in the above graph, but if you're truly interested in a CPU to CPU comparison the best way to do that would be to look at the Athlon on a KX133/KT133 and compare it to the Pentium III on a VIA 133A since the two chipsets share the same AGP and memory controllers. If you look at it like that, then there is a clear performance advantage that the Athlon holds over the Pentium III. The i820 + RDRAM platform does crowd things a bit while giving the Athlon more competition, but basically in this test you're coming away with a couple percent gain in performance simply by moving the L2 cache onto the die of the processor and increasing its clock speed. anandtech.com Under SYSMark 2000 we can finally start to see a decent increase in performance courtesy of the Thunderbird's full speed on-die L2 cache. One of the many factors that was penalizing the Thunderbird under SYSMark 2000 was the fact that its L2 cache was always running at or below 350MHz and one of the known traits of the benchmark is that it has a strong bias towards a fast memory subsystem and a fast L2 cache as well. Simply by moving the L2 cache on-die and increasing its clock speed the Thunderbird manages to pull away with a 10% improvement in performance under SYSMark 2000. While this doesn't put the Thunderbird at the very top of the chart it places the CPU very close to the Pentium III 1GHz (820) forerunner which is considerably more expensive. This 10% performance improvement is on the lower end of what we were told by AMD to expect from the Thunderbird seemingly ages ago, a 10 - 20% improvement in performance was what we could expect from the move to an on-die L2 cache running at clock speed. anandtech.com The Thunderbird manages to pull ahead of the regular Athlon by a little bit once again, under Quake III Arena the improvement is approximately 4%. While that is far from impressive, do keep in mind that the Athlon already has a fairly hefty L1 cache that has allowed it to perfom very well in spite of its prior lack of a high speed, low latency L2 cache. Once again for a true clock for clock CPU comparison you'd have to compare the Athlon on the KX133/KT133 to the Pentium III on a VIA 133A since the two share the same memory/AGP controller in which case the benchmarks speak for themselves. But that comparison also illustrates exactly how limited the Athlon is by its platform, with a faster memory controller and a better overall designed chipset the Athlon would most definitely pull ahead even further. But because it's being held back by the KX133/KT133 the Pentium III on the 820 platform ends up on top. anandtech.com UnrealTournament definitely goes to the Thunderbird. Prior to the Thunderbird's release the Pentium III on the 820 platform easily dominated the UnrealTournament tests, as you can tell by the above graph even the Pentium III on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset manages to beat out the original Athlon running at 1GHz on a KX133. Simply moving to the Thunderbird + KT133 platform results in an 11% improvement in performance which is definitely noticeable during normal gameplay. I'm happy with the results Can't wait for DDR and 266Mhz bus. Milo