Chasing The P4: Athlon Core With A New Design
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).
The AMD Athlon XP 2200+, based on the Thoroughbred core.
Construction of the new AMD Thoroughbred Core.
