The Giga-Battle Part 2

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Conclusion

There you have it! With the inclusion of Intel's 840 chipset in the Giga-evaluation, Giga-Pentium III is able to win each real world benchmark in this set. Only Giga-Athlon's pure FPU-performance is on top of Giga-Coppermine's.

As for the winner of this competition, the Giga-Pentium III, you are in a strange situation. First of all the product doesn't seem to be available. World wide only a handful of reviewers has done testing with it. European reviewers are ranting and raving about Intel's inability to supply review samples. Actual Giga-system are hardly in sight anywhere and I doubt that there will be any boxed Giga-Pentium III in retail shops for quite some time to come. So what does that leave us at? A Phantom-product has won the competition. It's as if an Athlete broke the latest 100m-race record by running on the moon. Even if Giga-Pentium III was available though, you would get the best performance out of an officially 'outdated' 440BX-platform, or out of an expensive i840-system, which currently doesn't support Giga-Pentium III as well.

Giga-Athlon may look like the loser in the benchmark results, but it might turn out as the actual winner. Even though the supply of Giga-Athlon is short as well, there is still the actual chance to purchase an Athlon Giga-system right now. This product is no phantom, and that makes quite a difference. AMD should also realize that Giga-Athlon lost this competition against Giga-Pentium III for two reasons:

  • Giga-Athlon should have been released with the 'Thunderbird'-core, which doesn't suffer from a slow 1/3-speed second level cache. Pushing Copper-Thunderbird in the Dresden-fab and holding off this crazy Giga-release by a bit would have made sure that Giga-Athlon is able to look a significant lot better against Giga-Coppermine. I am sure that Intel wouldn't have released Giga-Pentium III as prematurely as they did as well, so AMD could still have won the race.
  • It's about time for some Giga-platforms for Giga-Athlon. VIA's Apollo KX133 may be a step into the right direction, but it's hardly good enough against Intel's chipsets. Dual-processor support, dual SDRAM channels, DDR-support, .... is what Athlon will require to look good against its archenemy Coppermine and particularly against the upcoming Willamette.