Review- AMD Athlon XP 2000+ vs. Intel  Pentium 4 Northwood

Techware Labs gratefully recognizes AMD's support in making this review possible!

Review by Edward Chang, call sign: Big_E

May 7, 2002

Features:  

Logic Symbol Diagram

QuantiSpeed™ Architecture for enhanced performance

• Nine-issue superpipelined, superscalar x86 processor microarchitecture designed for high performance

• Multiple parallel x86 instruction decoders

• Three out-of-order, superscalar, fully pipelined floating point execution units, which execute x87 (floating point), MMX™ and 3DNow!™ instructions

• Three out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined integer units

• Three out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined address calculation units

• 72-entry instruction control unit

• Advanced hardware data prefetch

• Exclusive and speculative Translation Look-aside Buffers

• Advanced dynamic branch prediction
  

3DNow!™ Professional technology for leading-edge 3D operation

• 21 original 3DNow!™ instructions—the first technology enabling superscalar SIMD

• 19 additional instructions to enable improved integer math calculations for speech or video encoding and improved data movement for Internet plug-ins and other streaming applications

• 5 DSP instructions to improve soft modem, soft ADSL, Dolby Digital surround sound, and MP3 applications

• 52 SSE instructions with SIMD integer and floating point additions offer excellent compatibility with Intel’s SSE technology

• Compatible with Windows® XP, Windows 98, Windows 95, and Windows NT® 4.x operating systems

266MHz AMD Athlon™ XP processor system bus enables excellent system bandwidth for data movement-intensive applications

• Source synchronous clocking (clock forwarding) technology

• Support for 8-bit ECC for data bus integrity

• Peak data rate of 2.1GB/s

• Multiprocessing support: point-to-point topology, with number of processors in SMP systems determined by chipset implementation

• Support for 24 outstanding transactions per processor

The AMD Athlon™ XP processor with performance-enhancing cache memory features 64K instruction and 64K data cache for a total of 128K L1 cache. 256K of integrated, on-chip L2 cache for a total of 384K full-speed, on-chip cache.

Socket A infrastructure designs are based on high-performance platforms and are supported by a full line of optimized infrastructure solutions (chipsets, motherboards, BIOS).

• Available in Pin Grid Array (PGA) for mounting in a socketed infrastructure

• Electrical interface compatible with 266MHz AMD Athlon XP system buses, based on Alpha EV6™ bus protocol

Die size: approximately 37.5 million transistors on 128mm2. Manufactured using AMD's state-of-the-art 0.18-micron copper process technology at AMD's Fab 30 wafer fabrication facility in Dresden, Germany.

Feature Comparison:

What's Included:

AMD XP 2000+ processor

AMD heatsink-fan

AMD case sticker

Manual

Installation:

Installing a processor is not to be taken lightly. It requires caution and carefulness. First, lift the lever on the side of the socket. Then, match the pin configuration on the bottom of the processor with the holes on the socket and inserted the processor into the socket. Closed the lever back in place after the processor is properly inserted. Now, apply a tiny amount of thermal compound, such as Arctic Silver II, to the core's surface. Or, if using a stock Putting a CPU cooler on an AMD processor can be potentially harmful. It could crack or chip the CPU's core, thus disabling it, permanently. Now, the dangerous step. First, orient the bottom of the heatsink-fan with the socket. Then hook one end of the heatsink-fan, in my case a GlobalWin CAKII-38, on the socket and carefully apply pressure, using a flat-head screw driver, to fasten the unlatched end to the socket. During this process, I advise using one hand to hold the CPU cooler still over the processor, ensuring that it will not wobble and chip at the core's corners. A shim comes recommended. With this done, plug the CPU cooler's power cable into the motherboard's fan connector and everything is set.

On with the benchmarks!

Check the price of a Athlon XP 2000+!

 

	Benchmarks
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