Best PC Processor on the market and at very reasonable price
Disadvantages:
Hard to find a cheap decent motherboard, and the usual AMD heat and power consumption problems
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
AMD rushed on the high performance scene last Christmas with the release of the AMD Athlon and gave Intel there first competition. AMD had been around with the K6 chips (based on the NextGen chip). The K6 chip was a great budget chip on the socket 7 technology but had quite server weaknesses as well as being unable to produce the floating points of the Intel chips. So anyone who wanted to play high end games or run 3D graphics work the AMD chip was not the one for them. AMD had advertised the release of the K7 a new chip, which would work a lot like the Intel Pentium Chips, working as a riser card. The new slot, slot A was going to cause a few problems. They couldn’t use Slot 1 because Intel had the rights for it and the chipset makers were not about to re-write all there chipsets, so AMD opted for an upside down Slot 1 which they called Slot A. AMD definitely ruseled a few feathers when they realised the Athlon, the benchmarks were superior to Intel’s flagship in a lot of ways especially the floating point. The Athlon 600Mhz bosted a faster floating point than the Intel’s 700Mhz chip. Intel then decided to throw it’s weight around, and tried to bully the motherboard manufactures not to produce the AMD chipset as well as the VIA one. ASUS (in my opinion the best motherboard manufacture at the current moment) produced the K7M based on the AMD 750 chipset but did not label it made by ASUS and didn’t offer any support for the board, though it did perform the best in all the benchmarks. Intel’s bully technique didn’t work and they were forced to bring out the latest Pentium III core early the coppermine core boasting 256Kb cache on the processor die, also stopping the need for a PCB board to fit the cache, so Intel started shipping the chip on the Celeron socket 370. The new Intel chip was huge improvement to the last but they did and still do have trouble producing this chip at high speeds. As an answer to the coppermine AMD produced the Thunderbird. This chip was a lot like the coppermine, it had 256Kb L2 Cache on the die and also used the 18m process. It still to a certain extend had the Athlon’s power and heat problems but it delivered the goods. The thunderbird is now the fastest processor on the market and has made Intel red faced again and with the plans for AMD to use DDR SDRAM instead of the horrific RDRAM that Intel got it self into things are only going to get better. Another thing, which the consumer is going to like about the Thunderbird, is the price. At the moment (according to dabs direct) A Thunderbird 700Mhz costs £105 ex VAT while the Pentium III Coppermine costs 150ex VAT. As I mentioned earlier Intel can’t produce these chips of high speeds in large enough yields, at the moment AMD are the only chip maker who can produce chips of 1Ghz + in quantities in fact the 1Ghz from AMD are about £375 ex VAT while the Intel chips cost a lot more and at the moment is only available to OEMs. In conclusion the AMD Athlon is not only the cheapest of the two chips it also performs the best, do be careful though what motherboard you do buy I would recommend the ASUS A7V and you should probably have a 300 W power supply also make sure you have an Athlon approved heatsink and fan. If you want to see actual benchmark results between the chips and you want to find out about the next embarrassment of Intel’s (the fact the the AMD Duron (AMD’s Celeron Equilivent) is actually faster than a lot of the PIIIs!!!!) go to http://www.tomshardware.com
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Stability
Very stable
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