Price/Performance
Last but not least we are taking a look at the price/performance ratio. The provided CPU performance is not able to keep pace with the higher prices of the high speed models, making the 800 and 900 MHz models the best performers per $ right now.
We normalized the performance of the Athlon 800 as well as its performance/price ratio to 100. You can see that as the performance increases with faster Athlon models, the performance/price index drops, because the price difference between the Athlon processors is larger than their difference in performance. It is interesting to see that the ratio remains almost the same around 50, starting with Athlon-C 1000. This means that you get almost the same amount of performance for your money if you buy Athlon-C 1000, Athlon 1100, Athlon-C 1133 or Athlon 1200 and Athlon-C 1200. Still the best performance per buck is - as expected - found in the slower models Athlon 800 and Athlon 900.
The picture changes if you use the Athlon 800 as a reference point and check how much more performance you get for how much more money compared to the Athlon 800.
I was surprised myself when I saw that after the Athlon 900, which asks for $5.72 more money per percentage point of performance increase, the Athlon-C 1200 comes in No.2 with $6.65 per percentage point of increased performance compared to an Athlon 800. The 6.4% more performance of the Athlon 1000/100 is the most expensive, asking for $11.01 per percentage point. This unusual and maybe somewhat difficult chart shows that in comparison to the Athlon 800, the performance of the current top-model Athlon-C 1200 is not that expensive at all.
