Athlon Recharged
New Athlon XP gets faster and more power-efficient--but will it deliver on performance?Laurianne McLaughlin
Last year, AMD was the Tiger Woods of the microprocessor world, repeatedly whipping veteran Intel in many performance tests. But this year, Intel has chipped away at AMD's advantage. As reported here last month, the most recent top Pentium 4 systems finally showed that they could beat the best Athlon XP PCs in PC WorldBench 4 speed tests.
That victory seems short-lived, however, as AMD has bounced back with its 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ chip. Our first WorldBench tests of four new AMD-based PCs found that the best Athlon XP units match high-end P4 systems in office productivity, though P4 models are solidifying their lead in audio and video tasks.
Nevertheless, AMD Athlon XP-based machines still win the value trophy--they usually cost $200 to $300 less than similar P4 models.
As you might expect, both Intel and AMD have surprises planned for later this year, so power fiends may want to wait a few months before buying. (See " Will AMD's Hammer Nail It?" for more on AMD's next-generation chips.)
Tale of Tests
Results on multimedia and graphics tests were more variable. As we've often seen with Pentium 4 systems, the Poly 850E-2530 noticeably outperformed the four Athlon PCs on our audio and video encoding tests, doing particularly well on the Musicmatch Jukebox test. It also bested all but one of the Athlon units in Unreal game play (see the Test Report results).
However, the ABS system won the AutoCAD test by 25 seconds over the Pentium 4 Poly. That's notable, since this is the only test where the P4's 533-MHz frontside bus has distinguished itself in the past. All four Athlon PCs excelled on the two Photoshop tests.
Cache Questions
The Athlon XP 2200+ is manufactured using a.13-micron process instead of the.18-micron process used with prior Athlons. The new process is more cost-effective, and it produces cooler, more power-efficient chips, thus enabling faster successors without Texas-size heat sinks.
When Intel moved to the.13-micron process earlier this year, it raised the level 2 cache in its P4 chips from 256KB to 512KB. But AMD has chosen to make its new Athlon XPs with the same 256KB of L2 cache as the older chips. This helps explain why our Athlon XP 2200+ systems remain in rough parity with the tested P4 machine, rather than being well ahead. (As reported last month, Intel opted to release its recent 1.7-GHz Celeron with only 128KB of L2 cache to hit a lower price; the first PC we tested with this CPU was a mediocre performer.)
Cache isn't the only issue. The new Athlon has the same 266-MHz frontside bus as its predecessors; it's slower than the new DDR-333 memory and half the speed of the 533-MHz bus that the latest P4s use. Analysts say the slower bus hurts performance.
AMD says that a new Athlon XP chip, code-named Barton, shipping this fall, will have a 512KB L2 cache. But the company says it will not increase Barton's frontside bus speed, so it's unclear whether this chip will pull ahead of the P4. Meanwhile, predictably, Intel will hardly be standing still. The chip giant should be capable of shipping 3-GHz or even faster chips by that time, says IDC analyst Shane Rau.
But AMD won't stop with Barton. Hot on Barton's heels is AMD's eighth-generation family of chips, code-named Hammer, which will debut in late 2002. The first of these, a desktop chip code-named ClawHammer, will bear the Athlon brand name with an extension. Once the Hammer chips arrive, Athlon XPs will replace Duron chips in AMD bargain-level systems. Some Duron PCs will remain on the market in 2003, however.
Your Strategy
For now, your buying decision should be straightforward. Athlon XP 2200+ PCs like the ABS and Polywell units we tested save you a few hundred dollars over their P4 peers and offer loads of power for most standard tasks. (For more on the ABS unit, see this month's Top 15 Home PCs chart.)
The Falcon Northwest unit, stuffed with every goody that a power addict could covet--from 400-watt Klipsch speakers to two RAID-configured 40GB hard drives--may be overkill for most people, but you can scale down the package. For instance, a configuration with 512MB of memory, less fancy speakers, and no RAID storage costs roughly $2800, about $600 less than the tested unit. Similarly, the loaded $2996 Presario system costs $2607 with a 17-inch CRT monitor instead of our unit's 17-inch LCD screen.
And if you're an Intel fan, you need fret no longer that Athlon XP PCs leave P4s in the dust. In fact, the P4 retains its edge on multimedia tasks.
But as for who'll be atop the leaderboard at year's end, it's much too soon to guess.
| Buying Information |
ABS Awesome 3300 4 stars (08/01/2002) Street: $2099 |
| Buying Information |
Compaq Presario 8000Z 4 stars (08/01/2002) Street: $2996 |
| Buying Information |
Falcon Northwest Mach V Athlon XP 2200+ (Preproduction unit, not yet rated) Street: $3485 |
| Buying Information |
Polywell Poly 883VF-2200 (Preproduction unit, not yet rated) Street: $2150 |
Will AMD's Hammer Nail It?
AMD plans to unveil its eighth-generation CPUs in late 2002. The chips will sport entirely new designs and will debut in desktop PCs with an Athlon processor code-named ClawHammer. AMD Opteron, a chip designed for workstations and servers and offering support for multiple CPUs, should follow by mid-2003. Both CPUs will require new chip sets and motherboards; they won't use AMD's current Socket A scheme.
Opteron and ClawHammer will work with today's 32-bit applications and will also support 64-bit software through AMD's x86-64 instructions. AMD is hoping to use ClawHammer's 64-bit capability as an OinO to corporations, which have been fiercely loyal to Intel. Despite hype about 64-bit computing, consumers will be most interested in ClawHammer for its ability to maximize the use of fast system memory. Unlike today's Athlon XP, which communicates with main memory through the frontside bus, ClawHammer will talk directly with main memory using a memory controller that's integrated with the CPU, thereby eliminating some bottlenecks and improving performance. ClawHammer PCs are expected to support AGP 8X graphics cards, too.
As for the 64-bit capability, it will primarily be of use to programs that perform calculations in huge chunks or to those that must address very large amounts of memory, such as large enterprise databases, where a great deal of information needs to be processed and moved with no interruption, explains IDC analyst Shane Rau.
On the workstation and server side, the biggest question surrounding AMD Opteron machines is how many vendors will make them. Intel has an impressive customer base for its Itanium, says Kevin Krewell, general manager at MicroDesign Resources; meanwhile, AMD finds itself boxed out of most top-tier workstation and server companies.
For most of us, the transition to 64-bit computing is still years away. The vast majority of users simply don't work with the CAD, professional 3D, scientific modeling, and high-end database tools that will get the biggest boost from 64-bit technology.
Test Reports: Athlon XP 2200+ VS. 2.53-GHZ P4 Units: (Chart)
| System | Processor | Memory | Level 2 cache (KB) | PC WorldBench 4 | AutoCAD (seconds) | Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1: Lighting effects (seconds) | Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1: Multiple filters (seconds) | Musicmatch Jukebox 7 (seconds) | Windows Media Encoder 7.1: Audio file conversion (seconds) | Windows Media Encoder 7.1: Video file conversion (seconds) | Unreal Tournament(frames per second) |
| ABS Awesome 3300 | 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ | 512 MB DDR333 SDRAM | 256 | 123 | 280 | 45 | 58 | 20 | 59 | 59 | 111 |
| Falcon Northwest Mach V | 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ | 1GB DDR333 SDRAM | 256 | 120 | 295 | 47 | 59 | 21 | 60 | 62 | 102 |
| Compaq Presario 8000Z | 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ | 512MB DDR266 SDRAM | 256 | 122 | 302 | 47 | 60 | 21 | 67 | 65 | 94 |
| Polywell Poly 883VF-2200 | 1.8-GHz Athlon XP 2200+ | 512 MB DDR333 SDRAM | 256 | 120 | 297 | 47 | 60 | 21 | 61 | 63 | 101 |
| Polywell Poly 850E-2530 | 2.53-GHz Pentium 4 | 512MB PC800 RDRAM | 512 | 122 | 305 | 53 | 68 | 18 | 56 | 55 | 109 |
| Average of 3 systems | 1.73-GHz Athlon XP 2100+ | 512MB of RAM | 256 | 119 | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Average of 6 systems | 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 | 512MB of RAM | 512 | 120 | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Average of 5 systems | 2.2-GHz Pentium 4 | 512MB of RAM | 256 | 114 | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |