AMD Athlon XP 2600/2400+ - Introducing Thoroughbred Revision B

High End Workstation Performance (Continued)

High End Workstation Performance - SPEC viewperf 7.0 proe-01 - Frames per Second (higher is better) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4BGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz) 9.797 9.716 9.557 9.504 9.421 8.606 8.432 8.310 8.143 7.892 7.564 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 1

High End Workstation Performance - SPEC viewperf 7.0 ugs-01 - Frames per Second (higher is better) AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.13GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2.00GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1.80GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz) AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.4BGHz Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.40GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.20GHz (400MHz) Intel Pentium 4 2.0AGHz (400MHz) 5.051 5.037 5.008 4.993 4.976 3.691 3.648 3.594 3.525 3.460 3.379 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Final Words

With the Thoroughbred Revision B core AMD has given new life to the Athlon XP, and it couldn't have come at a better time. The Athlon XP 2600+, for the most part, offers performance competitive with the Pentium 4 2.53GHz; the same can be said about the Athlon XP 2400+ and the Pentium 4 2.4B. There's no clear performance advantage in either case for the vast majority of applications, but where AMD does hold the advantage is in price. The Athlon XP 2600+ and 2400+, once available, will retail for significantly less than their equivalently performing Intel counterparts.

While we don't approve of AMD pushing for essentially a paper-launch of these faster Thoroughbred parts, the CPUs are a welcome addition to the Athlon XP line. With the Pentium 4 still on track to hit 3GHz by the end of this year, and with a Q1-03 introduction of Hammer being very likely, it may be up to the Athlon XP to close the year out for AMD.