The Winner and New World Champion
June 27, 2000
Intel may have the deeper pockets, and it may have the lion's share of the x86 market, but it no longer has the fastest x86 processor. Bragging rights for that distinction have now passed back to AMD, whose new 1GHz "Athlon processor featuring performance-enhancing [256KB] on-chip L2 cache memory"-AKA, the Thunderbird-now reigns as the world's fastest x86. At least that's the case today, and it's likely to remain the case until Intel rolls out its Willamette processor with a new core later this year.
The Thunderbird debuts with clock speeds of 750, 800, 850, 900, 950 and 1,000MHz (1GHz). It is manufactured at AMD's Fab 25 plant in Austin and Fab 30 plant in Dresden, Germany, using a 0.18-micron process. The shrinkage from 0.25-microns is what made available the room for the on-die L2 cache. German Thunderbirds are being made with copper interconnects, while those from Austin will continue to use aluminum interconnects. The new Athlons contain 37 million transistors. Besides the on-chip L2 cache, the Thunderbirds feature Enhanced 3Dnow! Technology with 24 new instructions to improve data movement for Internet streaming, integer calculations, and DSP communications.
Though Athlon entered the market last August outperforming Intel's Pentium III, it had fallen behind the Coppermine Pentium III, which has 256KB of on-chip, full-speed L2 cache at higher clock rates. This is because the Athlon-like pre-Coppermine Pentium IIIs-used expensive off-chip L2 cache RAM. To keep costs down, the RAM ran at slower and slower fractional clock rates compared to the CPU. When introduced, the L2 cache ran at 50 percent of the processor's speed. By the time the 1GHz model was introduced, that was down to 33 percent. That design let the Coppermine Pentium III overtake the Athlon on performance.
Let's talk performance. AMD had no pre-built demonstration PCs available to me on short notice, so the company sent me a 1GHz, Socket A (462 pins) processor, and an Asus motherboard with Via chipset and 128MB of PC133 SDRAM. I paired it with a Maxtor hard disk and an nVidia GeForce DDR graphics controller. The resulting system aced all our benchmarks, earning a WinScore 5.0 mark of 156-by a wide margin, the highest WinScore achieved by any PC in our testing. This score beats the 1GHz Coppermine Pentium III-powered Dell Dimension XPS B1000R PC I tested in March by 19 points, or 14 percent. What's more, it beat the Dell on every single one of our tests (see table). It beats the 1GHz Athlon-powered Compaq Presario 5900Z I tested the same month (with the old Athlon) by 22 points, or 16 percent. On Bapco's SYSmark 2000, the Thunderbird posted a score of 171, again, the fastest we've tested at Winmag.com by a similar margin. It earned a score of 177 for Internet Content Creation, and 167 for Office Productivity.
The new Athlons are competitively priced as well, debuting at prices of $990, $759, $589, $507, $359, and $319 each in 1,000-unit quantities for the 1GHz, 950MHz, 900MHz, 850MHz, 800MHz, and 750MHz models, respectively. Intel's 1GHz Pentium III is also officially priced at $990 in 1,000-unit quantities.
So there's a new performance leader in town, though many computer buyers--particularly on the enterprise side-won't seriously even consider a non-Intel processor. Still, AMD is making gains in market share, little by little. Intel is a fierce competitor, and the company makes great products. Don't think they're sitting on their hands over there.
The question now becomes, "How will the Thunderbird stack up against Willamette?" I suspect we won't have to wait long to find out.
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