Monday, July 03, 2000

The test results (continued)

Here, the Athlon 1GHz reaches performance equal to that of the Pentium CUmine 933MHz. This is very impressive especially when taking into account the fact that our CUmine test system was running its AGP bus at 88.6MHz, rather than the conventional 66MHz. This was the case due to the fact that our Abit BX6 Rev2 motherboard does not have the ability to run the AGP bus at an independent frequency. So, when the FSB was pushed to 133MHz, the AGP bus hit 88.6MHz - thus providing an advantage to the PIII system. In short, despite being at a disadvantage, the Athlon manages to attain great performance when compared to the PIII.

Here, the Athlon processors manage to take the day, despite the fact that the CUmine 866MHz, and 933MHz systems were running their AGP busses at 88.6MHz, and thus have a slight advantage. When it comes to pushing heavy textures around, the Athlons - thanks in no small part to the power of their math coprocessors - manage to overcome any difference in performance due to the relative performance of their L2 caches.

Conclusions

In conclusion, while offering very solid performance, the Athlon 1000MHz is slightly out-performed by the Intel Pentium III 933MHz. The major reason for that is undoubtedly the on-die L2 cache possessed by all of the Pentium Coppermines. So, the principal advantages of the Athlon would have to be its price - which is still lower than competing Intel CPUs, and its superior FPU - which has shown its benefits when dealing with 3D graphics environments with complex textures. So, it all comes down to a price/performance evaluation. For those who demand even more performance, though, they may best be served by AMD's Thunderbird and Duron processors, which include on-die L2 caches; a fact which should provide those Athlons a 15% performance advantage over their otherwise identical predecessors.

For additional information, visit AMD's web site.

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