AMD Athlon 1GHz, 950MHz, 900MHz

AnandTech CPU Rating

Performance

The new Athlon CPUs are definitely the fastest CPUs ever to come out of AMD, and currently they are the fastest x86 contenders in the market. While that may change with the release of competing products from Intel, they are still very high performers.

While the 1GHz Athlon doesn't offer much for the gamer or the home office user, for the professional, the 1GHz Athlon cannot be touched as long as it is paired with a KX133 based motherboard.

The performance of the CPU is hindered by its 1/3 L2 cache divider which is why we give it a rating of 8.0 in this category and not the 8.5 it would otherwise have received.

Features

The Athlon processor itself has quite a few features that help distinguish it from competing products, such as its 100MHz DDR (200MHz) EV6 FSB, its powerful FPU, etc.. unfortunately because of the external L2 cache that even the 1GHz Athlon is still boasting the rating is dropped to 6.5.

Price

For CPUs price isn't the main issue, it is the particular CPU's price to performance ratio. For the Athlon, especially with the recent price drops this ratio is quite high giving AMD a fairly good rating here.

The 900 - 1000MHz parts covered here are definitely not the most cost efficient since they are recent introductions which is what keeps the rating at 6.5.

Availability

The Athlon has enjoyed very nice availability in recent times, especially when compared to the Pentium III.

With AMD devoted to supplying their lead OEMs with 1GHz Athlon parts this month and the general public being able to pick up 900/950MHz parts later this month as well, the availability of these CPUs shouldn't be a problem at all.

As far as yield goes, AMD has been very successful with yields on the Athlon CPUs and these new CPUs are going to continue that trend.