Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > CPU > A New Kind Of Fast: AMD Athlon XP 2200+

A New Kind Of Fast: AMD Athlon XP 2200+

1:07 PM - June 10, 2002 by Frank Völkel

1. Chasing The P4: Athlon Core With A New Design
2. Chasing The P4: Athlon Core With A New Design, Continued
3. Now Required: Protection Against Thermal Death
4. Now Required: Protection Against Thermal Death, Continued
5. Comparison: T-Bred Vs. Palomino Vs. T-Bird Vs. (Barton)
6. Heat Dissipation: All AMD-CPUs Compared
7. Exclusive Details On The Barton (Q3 2002)
8. Greater Yield: 322 Athlon-CPUs Per Wafer
9. Clock Increase And Heat Dissipation
10. Overclocking: Not A Whole Lot Possible
11. New Guidelines For CPU Coolers: No Cheap Models, Continued
12. Confusion: Differentiating Between Thoroughbred & Palomino

13. Test Setup And Details
14. 32 Benchmarks Under Windows XP
15. Benchmark Results
16. DirectX 7 Games: 3D Mark 2000
17. MP3 Audio-Encoding: Lame MP3
18. MPEG-2 Video Encoding: Pinnacle Studio 7
19. SiSoft Sandra 2002 Benchmarks: CPU Und Multimedia
20. Multimedia-Performance: PC Mark 2002
21. Office-/Internet-Performance: Sysmark 2002
22. 3D Rendering Performance: SPECviewperf
23. Archiving: WinACE 2.11
24. 3D-Rendering: Cinema 4D XL 7.303
25. Conclusion: The Competition Bids Adieu

The smaller rival seems to be slightly weakened. However, the reasons for this are quite obvious: the Athlon design is not meant for such high clock speeds as is the case for its competitor. And the latter is moving ahead by leaps and bounds in MHz.

In our last comparison test (The Die Has Been Cast: Pentium 4/2533 vs. Athlon XP 2100+ ) Intel's top model, the P4 with 2.53 GHz, was able to beat the Athlon XP 2100+ in all of the benchmark disciplines. But keep in mind that with modern processors, clock speed alone does not directly correspond to performance. The higher performance of the AMD's arch enemy, Intel's P4, was above all the result of a newer chip architecture, a large L2 cache and the optional Rambus platform. Ultimately, it's no secret that the Pentium 4 runs at top form only in combination with PC1066 memory (533 MHz, currently available).