AMD Launches Athlon Processor at 1300 and 1333 MHz – THG.RU

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.

Athlon 1300 and Athlon 1333

AMD’s president Hector Ruiz recently said that AMD doesn’t feel particularly pushed to release the next speed grade Athlon processor, because the current flagship at 1.2 GHz was well able to compete against Intel’s Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz. Some very smart people concluded that in reality AMD’s upcoming Athlon 1300/1333 was not ready for launch. I can only say that I happen to know extremely well when AMD started shipping Athlon 1333 samples to 1st tier reviewers. Be assured that Athlon 1333 is reality for well over a month. Right now there doesn’t seem the slightest problem to produce even faster Athlon or Duron processors. I suggest that those doubters stop warming up old stories and start doing their homework instead. If I try hard to remember stories of processors unfit for release it’s not AMD that comes to my mind.

From an engineering standpoint, Athlon 1.3 GHz is ‘simply’ a refined version of the previous Athlon processors with ‘Thunderbird‘ core. No major features have been added and the manufacturing process has not been changed either. The newly released Athlon is still a ‘Thunderbird’.

Chipsets – Athlon’s Achilles Heel

While AMD’s processors have rightfully managed to reach highest acclaim, there still remains a touchy weakness concerning their platforms. AMD has still a long way to go to reach Intel’s strength in the chipset arena. If we benevolently forget Intel’s Camino and MTH debacle, we remember that for a long time Intel has been providing the best platforms for their processors. Latest since 1995 and the 430FX-chipset, the best performing platform for Intel processors used to be an Intel chipset.

Unfortunately, the story with AMD is a bit different. Although AMD released the AMD750 chipset for its first SlotA Athlon in 1999 and recently the AMD760 chipset for Athlon-C and DDR-SDRAM, the majority of platforms for AMD-processors come from Taiwanese third party chipset makers. AMD750 and its mere 2xAGP-support was not advanced enough and thus soon replaced by VIA’s Apollo KX133 and later KT133 chipset. It might well be that AMD760, the currently most advanced Athlon-chipset, might also soon give way to products from ALi and VIA. The latter two might not perform as well as AMD760, but they are less expensive and thus more attractive to the OEMs of this world. In this case, AMD760 might continue to live in the SMP-arena only, once AMD760MP has been released.

I personally don’t welcome this possible and rather likely scenario. AMD should follow Intel’s example and provide the best chipsets for its processors to ensure continued success. However, I guess that AMD has simply not got the resources to realize that for the time being. This leaves AMD in a rather precarious situation. AMD760 doesn’t seem to reach the expected price points; ALi’s MaGiK1 is a rather mediocre performer and VIA follows its old history of requiring ages to develop a functioning product.

People who don’t need to squeeze the last bit of performance out of their Athlon processors can of course still live without DDR-memory support and plug their Athlon-C in a motherboard with VIA’s Apollo KT133A chipset and PC133 SDRAM. Performance freaks however should take my advice and look for AMD760-platforms.

Performance

The most important thing about AMD’s new processors is of course their performance. We obviously expect improved benchmark scores over Athlon 1200, but of course less than we showed in the Power Box article with the vapo-chilled Athlon 1600.

I decided to test Athlon-C 1333 on my reference AMD760/DDR platform MS-6341 or ‘K7 Master’ from MSI. It competes against its predecessor Athlon-C 1200 on the same platform and Intel’s flagship CPU Pentium 4 1.5 GHz on an Asus P4T i850-motherboard.

Handling

Athlon 1333 turned out to run surprisingly cool. Keeping the core voltage at the official 1.75 V and without the requirement of an above-average cooler, it happened to be very overclockable. 1466 MHz at 1.75 V were no problem whatsoever, which is why I included those results into the benchmark runs as well.

Benchmark Setup

I decided to run the new Athlon at 1333 and overclocked 1466 MHz through the same huge benchmark suite that I used for the Power Box article. I also included the results of our Power Box with the vapo-chilled Athlon 1600. Besides the Pentium 4 1.5 GHz you won’t find results of an overclocked Pentium 4, because I simply dislike the fact that Pentium 4 overclocking requires the alteration of memory, processor bus, PCI as well as AGP clock. Athlon can be overclocked without those risky maneuvers that always jeopardize reliable system operation. I don’t mind some die-hard overclockers playing around with Pentium 4 overclocking, but anyone who does serious work on his system should better refrain from it. I would never write my articles on an overclocked P4-platform, because I hate re-writing parts of my story numerous times.

Office / Web Benchmarks

Good old Sysmark2000 shows the well-known picture. Pentium 4 is left far behind by each of the tested Athlon processors. The Office applications used in Sysmark2000 are simply not optimized for Pentium 4 and Athlon can handle this kind of software much better.

Webmark2001 is a benchmark that was released from BAPCo pretty much at the same time when Intel released Pentium 4. Looking at the results may make this fact seem more than just a coincidence, as it makes Pentium 4 look very good. The new Athlon 1333 is not quite able to reach the scores of Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, but once it’s overclocked to 1466 MHz it can even score a tiny edge over the Intel CPU.

Breaking up Webmark2001 in its three different parts shows almost the same results in its business-to-business section. Pentium 4 is only beat by the Power Box.

The business-to-consumer part of Webmark2001 is Athlon’s strength and Pentium 4 is left behind by all AMD-contestants.

The intranet simulation is where Pentium 4 can shine in all of its glory. Even the Power Box is left behind.

All in all it is still pretty difficult to judge the meaningfulness of Webmark2001, but the same could be asked about Sysmark2000. Today’s processors are way fast enough to run office applications or Internet-stuff. It would be crazy to make any of the processors in this test a winner based on those two benchmarks.

3D Games

In old tradition we start with Quake 3 and Demo001 at 640×480 and high-color. It’s the only ‘benchmarkable’ 3D game right now that shows Pentium 4 in a good light. Athlon 1333 remains behind Pentium 4 1.5 GHz. However, who plays Q3A at 640×480 and considers 188 fps as too little for game play?

At the reasonable resolution of 1024×768 and true-color the story changes. The 3D-card (we used a NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra card) becomes the bottleneck, making all contestants perform alike. Even slower processors would reach the same scores. This should make you wonder if you indeed require a great P4-box with mediocre 3D-card to play the next games.

The polygon-rich NV15-demo shows that Pentium 4 is not necessarily blazing-fast in Quake3. Athlon 1333 is able to beat Pentium 4 1.5 GHz in this demo, though only slightly.

At the higher resolution and true-color the picture hardly changes. All processors are performing pretty much alike, with Athlon 1333 slightly, but meaninglessly beating Pentium 4 1.5 GHz.

3D Games, Continued

Unreal Tournament is also a very popular game, but somehow it doesn’t seem to like Pentium 4 as much as Id’s Quake 3. Pentium 4 is left quite a bit behind each of the four Athlons.

Unreal Tournament is not limited by the graphics card, but by the processor, so that the results are hardly changing at the higher resolution and true color. Athlon is clearly the better processor for UT.

The DirectX7 game Evolva shows once more that Athlon is the better choice for 3D-gamers. There’s of course no doubt that the 640×480 resolution is a little used as frame rates above 200 fps are required for smooth game play, but one fact remains: Athlon beats Pentium 4.

Once dot3-bump mapping is enabled and the resolution is cranked up to 1024×768 and true color, the 3D-card is once more the limiting factor and all processors score the same results.

3D Games, Continued

MDK2 is an OpenGL game such as Quake 3, but once more Pentium 4 remains behind the Athlon processors.

At 1024x768x32 all processors score alike again.

Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing is tough on the 3D-card, so the differences between the processors are rather minimal even at low resolution. Still Pentium 4 makes up the rear.

At 1024x768x32 the differences become unnoticeable.

3D Games, Continued

Good old Expendable is the last test in the 3D-gaming arena. Once more Pentium 4 scores worst.

Even the higher resolution and true color don’t change the picture.

Finally we used the older 3Dmark2000 to see Athlon beat Pentium 4 once more.

3Dmark2001 scores will be added soon.

Video Processing

Video2000 is doesn’t make much of a difference between the five processors and Pentium 4 wins with a tiny edge.

The iDCT-part (required for the decoding of the MPEG2-stream) of the MPEG4-encoding software FlasK is optimized for Athlon as well as Pentium 4 and here you can see how powerful Pentium 4 can be. Even the Athlon 1600 of the Power Box is unable to beat Pentium 4 1.5 GHz.

SPECviewperf 6.1.2

SPEC’s benchmark for professional OpenGL application performance shows Athlon on par, or most of the time ahead of Pentium 4. Once more Pentium 4 is beaten by its competitor from AMD.

Synthetic Benchmark Sandra 2001

I included these numbers for the overclocking freaks amongst you, who love Sandra2001 so much. The CPU performance part shows Athlon beating Pentium 4, but I will refrain from commenting on the meaningfulness of these results in real life.

The above-said is also valid for those numbers. Athlon scores higher than Pentium 4 in the multi media sub-benchmark. Don’t ask me what that means though.

The memory benchmarks demonstrates the powerful dual-channel RDRAM memory subsystem of Pentium 4. Athlon on AMD760 with DDR-SDRAM gets beaten badly. Once more the question remains what those numbers really tell us though.

Evaluation

Now that I have drowned you in 1000 and 1 benchmark, the question remains what value AMD’s new Athlon 1333 really represents. Do we need it right now?

Let’s be frank, the times when we were asking for faster processors to improve the work with our daily applications is over. Word processors, spread sheet applications, presentation software and even 3D-games run just fine on any current processor with more than 800 MHz clock speed. It will be very difficult to notice a real difference between a Duron 800 and a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz when running common software. There is only a very small minority of people who really benefit from the added performance of the latest top-notch microprocessor.

The release of Athlon 1333 as well as the upcoming release of Pentium 4 1.7 GHz are important for only a small minority of users, but most crucial for AMD’s and Intel’s marketing departments. There is no reason to blame those companies for it, because it is all our fault. It’s the people out there in front of the television and computer screens who conclude that only the company that makes the fastest microprocessor is able to make microprocessors good enough for them. It’s like watching a boxing match. You want to see one guy win and you will disrespect the guy who loses, even though he could easily beat you to pulp within seconds.

Let’s have a look at a little evaluation chart:

The overall score contains the four other scores in the following (arbitrary) weighing:

• 35% Office / Web
• 35% 3D-Gaming
• 20% Video
• 10% Professional OpenGL

Evaluation, Continued

From that point of view Pentium 4 1.5 GHz is pretty much on par with Athlon 1200. It’s almost 5% behind Athlon 1200 in 3D-gaming and 10% behind Athlon 1200 in professional OpenGL, but identical in Office / Web and 15% faster in video.

Athlon 1333 is in average only about 6% faster than Athlon 1200. Keep that in mind when you have to decide between the two. If you overclock Athlon 1333 to 1466 MHz the gain over Athlon 1200 is about 10%. That’s something, but still not exactly mind-blowing. The expense of a Vapochill system gives you almost 15% over Athlon 1200. That’s all you will get.

Conclusion

With the release of Athlon 1300/1333 AMD has shown that it is well capable to offer faster Thunderbird-cores. The processor leaves Intel’s Pentium 4 1.5 GHz behind and earns AMD the performance crown once again. However, Intel will soon release Pentium 4 1.7 GHz, which will close the gap once more. The race for the fastest PC-microprocessor continues and once more AMD has struck first.

For the real performance freaks Athlon 1333 could mean a lot more. It is much more overclockable than Athlon 1200 and running cooler than its predecessor as well. I doubt that it will take AMD long to be ready for Athlon at 1466 MHz. This clock speed can definitely be reached before the highly successful Thunderbird core will need replacement. Intel’s life hasn’t become any easier today.

Finally you can have a look at the latest official AMD-pricing scale:

It’s easy to spot the fact that AMD’s pricing is way more attractive than Intel’s, but I suppose that I don’t tell you any news here.