ПРОЦЕССОРЫ

Томас Пабст,  22 марта 2001 Страница:   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Introduction

Lately, the PC-market hasn't really been too exciting. OK, there is NVIDIA's recently announced GeForce3 graphics chip, which impressed all 3D-savvy PC-users with its incredibly rich new feature set. It is still not available however, and so the market remains quiet.

AMD has indeed managed to apply a major change to the microprocessor scene. It's about a year ago that AMD was the first CPU maker to introduce a processor running at 1 GHz and since this time the Athlon remained ahead of all Intel processors in the desktop market in terms of overall performance as well as price/performance. The release of Intel's Pentium 4 processor at the end of last year was able to change the situation a little bit, but it still couldn't push Athlon from its well-deserved position as being the PC-processor with the highest acclaim and excellent reputation.

Intel is trying hard to get back to the top, where it used to be for decades. The Pentium 4 is certainly no bad product whatsoever, but so far the majority of PC-users remains skeptical. Lately Intel dropped the prices of Pentium 4 to improve its attractiveness. However, most people, including myself, consider those price drops as not substantial enough to bet on Intel's 'net-bursting' flagship processor. While Intel paints Pentium 4 in the brightest colors, the reality shines in a different light. Pentium 4 is only performing really well with specifically optimized software. Today's software does not have those tweaks and the question remains, why anyone should buy a car today, when its tires will only be available in months or even years from now.

So while Intel is trying to attract us with substantially priced future tunes plus a handful of the oh-so-beloved RDRAM, AMD continues almost stoical with its Athlon strategy. So far this strategy has paid off well, making AMD's Athlon the most 'true-value' PC-processor to date.

Today's release of Athlon 1300, running with a 1.3 GHz core and 100/200 MHz bus clock, as well as Athlon 1333, coming with 1.333 GHz core and 133/266 MHz bus clock, is only the logical consequence of refined engineering without any 'net burst' or 'rapid execution' galore. Depending on your stance towards AMD and Intel, you could call Athlon just 'simply straight forward', 'unglamorous' or 'less advanced', compared to Pentium 4. One fact remains, Athlon doesn't try to be something that it's not. It's a 'working-class' processor, rough, honest, reliable and hard working, but also always hungry.

feed_id: 6177 pattern_id: 2818

Страница:   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ |Одной страницей|Версия для печати

Introduction Athlon 1300 and Athlon 1333 Chipsets - Athlon's Achilles Heel Performance Handling Benchmark Setup     Office / Web Benchmarks     3D Games     Video Processing     SPECviewperf 6.1.2     Synthetic Benchmark Sandra 2001 Evaluation Conclusion  Обсуждение в Клубе Экспертов THG