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AMD Athlon 800Mhz Processor Review
AMD Athlon 800Mhz Processor Review - PCSTATS
The AMD Socket A Athlon CPU's is the PIII alternative for computer users demanding high-end performance, but without the high price tag that is usually attached to it.
 90% Rating:   
Filed under: CPU / Processors Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: AMD Dec 15 2000   B. Ly  
Home > Reviews > CPU / Processors > AMD Athlon 800MHz

Athlon 800Mhz Processor Review


The AMD Socket A Athlon CPU's is the PIII alternative for computer users demanding high-end performance, but without the high price tag that is usually attached to it. Without a doubt, the Socket A (Thunderbird) AMD CPU's are the best price/performance buys on the market today. While prices are relatively cheap, the performance of AMD's Athlon CPU's is hardly anything to scoff at. AMD has managed to fuse many of the consumer ideals into their high-end CPU lineup, fast, stable, and affordable. Today we'll be looking at AMD's 800 Mhz Athlon.

AMD Athlon Socket A Thunderbird 800Mhz : $108 USD / $165 CDN

As a quick overview, the Thunderbird series of Athlons represents AMD's answer to the 1:1 core to cache speed ratio Pentium III's (Coppermine) that have been available for quite some time now. I can recall when the Pentium III Katmai (512K cache half speed cache) CPU's were getting beaten around by the old Slot A Athlons (with 512K variable speed cache). Intel answered with their 256KB 1:1 core to cache speed Pentium III's. They were able to outpace the current Athlons at the time because the 256KB of L2 cache on the new Pentium III's allowed Intel to take the performance lead over the Athlon. Now we are at a time where the Pentium III, and Athlon are fighting on a more even ground (in regards to L2 cache speed and size). Unfortunately for Intel and the Pentium III, the Athlon does have some other obvious advantages (aside from price). And that is the fact that the Pentium III only has 32KB of L1 cache, and the Athlon has 128KB. Coupled with the fact that the Athlon has a faster and more advanced floating point unit, as well as a faster 100 Mhz DDR bus, it'll be hard for the Pentium III to keep up with it. And oh yeah, Pentium III's are realistically topping out at 933Mhz, mostly because the 1Ghz models are still relatively hard to find, and are priced well beyond the reach of most consumers. 1Ghz Athlons are readily available, and are quite affordable ($175 USD / $262 CDN). Nonetheless this is an Athlon 800Mhz review, not a 1Ghz review... but that's where overclocking shall come in.

AMD Athlon Processor Overview
The AMD Athlon processor is among the world's most powerful engines for PC computing, and represents the industry's first seventh-generation x86 microarchitecture. The AMD Athlon processor family is designed to power the next generation in x86 computing platforms. It meets the computation-intensive requirements of cutting-edge software applications running on high-end desktop systems, workstations, and servers. All AMD Athlon processors are now produced using 0.18-micron process technology.

The AMD Athlon processor provides exceptional processing power on real-world, mainstream Microsoftr Windowsr compatible software, as well as computation-intensive applications for high-end desktops. These high-end workstation applications include digital photo editing, digital video, commercial 3D modeling, image compression, soft DVD, CAD, and speech recognition .

Features:

  • Microarchitecture: The AMD Athlon processor features a superpipelined, nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized for high clock frequencies. The AMD Athlon processor contains a total of nine execution pipelines: three for address calculations, three for integer calculations, and three for executing x87 (floating point), 3DNow!"! and MMX"! instructions.
  • System Bus:The AMD Athlon processor's system bus is the first x86 platform bus running at or above 200MHz. At present, AMD Athlon processors are available with 266MHz and 200MHz system buses. As one of the fastest x86 processor buses currently available, the design delivers as high as 100 percent more peak bandwidth than any x86 system bus. It is designed for scalable multiprocessing and leverages high-performance Alpha"! EV6 bus technology to enable exceptional system performance.
  • Floating Point Engine: The AMD Athlon processor includes the first fully pipelined, superscalar floating point engine for x86 platforms. The resulting floating point capability is the most powerful ever delivered in an x86 processor.
  • Enhanced 3DNow!"! Technology: The AMD Athlon processor's enhanced 3DNow! technology takes 3D multimedia performance to incredible heights and builds on the 21 instructions of AMD's original 3DNow! technology-the first x86 instruction set to use superscalar SIMD floating point techniques. Enhanced 3DNow! technology adds 24 instructions-19 to improve MMX integer math calculations and enhance data movement for Internet streaming applications and 5 DSP extensions for soft modem, soft ADSL, Dolby Digital, and MP3 applications.
  • Cache Architecture: The AMD Athlon processor boasts a 384K total full-speed on-chip system cache including 128K L1 cache--four times that of Intel's Pentiumr III processor--and 256K on-chip full-speed L2 cache. This performance-enhancing cache design helps boost overall system performance.
  • All of this information is quite interesting, but how well does it really stack up? Read on to see the 800Mhz SiSoft Sandra scores. But first, our test setup:

    Test Machine:

    AMD Athlon 800Mhz with Global Win FOP cooler (27.2 CFM) fan.
    ABIT KT7 RAID Motherboard
    2x128MB Infineon PC-133 RAM
    Asus V7700 Geforce 2 Video card @ 235Mhz/ 365Mhz
    And some other stuff that do not really factor into the benchmarks.

    © 2023 PCSTATS.com Next Page >

     

    Contents of Article: AMD Athlon 800MHz
     Pg 1.  — AMD Athlon 800Mhz Processor Review
     Pg 2.  SiSoft Sandra @ 800Mhz:
     Pg 3.  Synthetic Benchmark Scores
     Pg 4.  SiSoft Sandra @ 1000Mhz:
     Pg 5.  Quake III Benchmarks
     Pg 6.  Conclusions and final results

     
    Hardware Sections 


     
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