Todays computer market is no longer dominated by Intel and this can only be a good thing. While Intel certainly have product recognition going for them they also have the stigma of being associated with incredibly high prices. It was no surprise then when other processor manufacturers started making a name for themselves who while still producing quality products cut the cost of buying decent high powered processor chips by an extreme amount.
AMD are one such company but I would hasten to say that they are not just any company. AMD have made a name for themselves in the best way. Many AMD users like myself would agree that AMD are quite simply better and it is more often than not the case that once you have gone AMD you never look at another brand.
While Intel have the higher profile and advertising at the moment AMD have product loyalty and this would never have happened if their products were not upto scratch.
In my opinion there are two types of computer users in the world. Intel users and AMD users. I don't want to talk out of place but it has been my experience that these same catagories can also be classified as people who know computers and people who don't.
The vast majority of Intel users are people who don't know that much about their system. Chances are they bought their system from a high street chain store or a larger place like PC World and they went with whatever the salesman ( a spotty, uneducated trainee who actually knows jack about computers whatsoever ) told them was the most popular system or the best system at the moment. This of course has nothing to do whatsoever with the system being their most expensive product and he will get a sales fee for flogging the £1000+ computer.
The AMD user however is quite different. They fall into many catagories including the gamer, the designer, the programmer etc etc. What sets the typical AMD user aside from the typical Intel user however is that a fairly high percentage of AMD users build thier own systems and would never pay the over inflated prices that computer store chains charge.
As such the Amd user is looking for quality, speed, reliability and lower costs and this is where the AMD ATHLON XP 2200+ comes into play.
Okay this is the confussing part. It isn't a 2200 mhz chip but is infact a 1800 mhz chip. Why AMD have named their chips in such a way is anyones guess but when you read the full title of the product ( AMD ATHLON XP 2200+ [1.80Ghz] 266HMZ FSB 384KB CACHE 3DNOW PRO - THOROUGHBRED CORE ) it does state quite plainly that it is infact a 1.80 Ghz ( 1800 mhz ) processor.
Now for the tech info:
The AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor has a performance-enhancing cache memory feature of 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. It's 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 80mm2. Manufactured using AMD's state-of-the-art 0.13-micron copper process technology.
And if that isn't enough technobabble for you here's the whole list of features:
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. 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. 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. Compatible with Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows 98 operating systems.
What does all this mean ?? To be honest most of it I have no idea what it means but then not everything is in the techobabble.
Once again the proof is in the pudding ( and to anyone who has read any of my other ops ... no I still have no idea what that means ) so I can tell you and be totally secure in doing so that this is one mother of a chip. So far I have had no hassles whatsoever in any shape or form using this chip. Nothing has said that I don't have enough processing power and what's more my system runs so smooth and fast it even surprised me to start with.
The big question however is that after having used this chip for a while and pushing it as much as I can have I noticed any ebbing of power, speed or reliabilty. The answer to that question is a big catagorical NO !! I push my system alot and I do mean ALOT. My system is on 24 hours a day and I use some pretty high processor sapping applications on a very regular basis. My system never gets chuggy and so far my system have never flipped me the bird and told me that it can't do that because I have too many other things running simultaneously. It has out performed my expectations at every step and level and I seem to be incapable of pshing it past it's limit no matter how hard I try ( I'm a computer sadist ).
In short this chip is the bomb, it does exactly what it says on the tin ... oh wait a minute that's Ronsil isn't it. Well you get the idea. I for one will never buy Intel. I trust AMD totally and this chip has been no exception other than to surpass everything I hoped for.
Before I forget, the price. Well different places charge different prices so I cannot place and exact price on this chip. Suffice to say however that I have seen it range from somewhere between £100 and £130 and it is worth every penny.
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