AMD's 760 Chipset: DDR for the Athlon is here

SPECfp2000 Performance Summary

In spite of SPEC CFP2000's compiler dependencies it tells us quite a bit about the performance of DDR and higher memory bandwidth solutions in future applications.

For starters, in many situations, the Athlon requires specific attention be paid to optimizing for its unique architecture in order to gain the most performance out of it. Intel holds the advantage here in that their C/C++ and Fortran compilers are readily available to developers which obviously make optimizing for the Pentium III a fairly simple task. In contrast, AMD must rely on not only these Intel compilers which obviously don't favor the Athlon platform in addition to third party compilers that don't necessarily have all of the latest Athlon optimizations in all versions. This helps to explain why the Athlon was outperformed under some SPECfp_base2000 tests while enabling more aggressive optimizations tilted the balance in the favor of AMD.

The combination of PC2100 DDR SDRAM and the 266MHz EV6 bus is killer for AMD, it often times puts the i840 to shame. For the high-end workstation, the i840 is no longer the best solution as the AMD 760 chipset can easily outperform it in many situations, not to mention that it is much cheaper. There was only one situation in which the Athlon/AMD 760 setup came out as the slowest among the four, that being the Mesa test, however with proper optimizations you will notice that the performance of that same platform comes within 1 point of the Pentium III/i840 test bed.

There were a number of situations (7 out of 14 to be exact) in which the Athlon on the KT133 was the slowest solution of the four. This, combined with the knowledge we extracted from the Linpack benchmarks earlier helps to illustrate the shortcomings in VIA's memory controller that is present in the KT133. Remember that this is the same memory controller that we criticized on the KX133 chipset and on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset. We have said it before and we'll say it again, the KT133 chipset is continuing to hold back the performance of the Athlon. While it's better now than when the memory controller was first introduced to the Athlon on the KX133 chipset, it's still a noticeably limiting factor. Let's hope that VIA's DDR memory controller is better.