Today we are going to bring you a review that has been due for a while. AMD's Athlon 3000+ processor. RAW performance for an acceptable price, that's what AMD has been delivering for the past few years to us. However, things are not that good for this chipzilla lately, reported annual losses plus they had to let go a lot of people to reduce overall costs. On top of that they somewhat stated last year that they would no longer be interested to run the 'who's the fastest' race with Intel while that is so important for brand recognition. Lately however we have been hearing a lot of good news from them. Opteron was just released and Athlon 64 is just around the corner. All extremely exciting news and information. A new generation of CPU's is just around the corner. The year 2003 is going to be an exciting one.
The processor we are going to test today is based upon the core codename Barton. This new core is made on a new 0.13-micron process fabrication process which in fact is the same as Athlon-64. The previous generation Athlon CPU's where based upon the Thoroughbred core. The biggest difference ? A much larger cache.
The Thoroughbred core had 128KB L1 and 256KB L2 cache memory while the Barton core has a doubled amount of that same level 2 cache, 512 KB. The big advantage of a bigger on-die cache can be found for various reasons however is based on a simple theory. The CPU can store data and instructions local. The CPU does not have to retrieve that data from the main memory which makes it way more efficient and thus produces higher performance, that in combination with a clocked core frequency at 2166 MHz and increased Front Side Bus at 333 MHz ladies and gentlemen is Athlon XP 3000+ and we are going to test this puppy today ... the gamers way.
First let's take a look on some photo's we took of this processor.
The Barton based Athlon XP 3000+
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