Re: [vox-tech] athlon questions

[Bill Broadley <bill@mathMAPS.ucdavis.edu>]

For anyone considering buying athlons, a few things to keep in mind.

There are athlons that have 512k offchip cache running at 250-300 Mhz,
make sure you don't buy one of those.  You definitely want the 1 Ghz
chip with the onchip 256k Cache running at cpu speed.  The onchip cache
often is signified by "256K cache", "advanced cache", or tbird.

AMD's rumored to have a rev of the tbird out this month, which is creating
stress at intel, and resulted in several chips being announced long
before it was scheduled.  I.e. 1.0 Ghz laptops, 1.3 Ghz p4's, and similar.

I think it's nick named palmino or similar, (mustang was one of the
previous nicknames).

Today theres 2 tbird options, 200 Mhz fsb, and 266 Mhz fsb (actually it's
100 ddr, and 133 ddr).  2 memory options as well PC133 and DC2100 (which
is actually 133 Mhz memory transfering twice per cycle, somewhat
similar to 266 Mhz memory).

DDR for the moment is quite expensive, but as it turns out it's the
latency thats the big bottleneck on performance these days not bandwidth.

So while /266 CPU's with DDR memory (similar to ram running at 266) show
up to 10% improvement on a wide variety of workloads, benchmarks, and games.

Turns out though that the new kt133a motherboards that handle /200 and
/266 cpu's show most of the performance increase even with PC133 memory.

So if your considering a new athlon I'd get recommend:
A. Get less then 1 Ghz cpu, and a kt133a motherboard
B. Get 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2 Ghz cpu (starting at $180 ish) with a /266 interface
   and a kt133a motherboard
C. Wait for the rev of the tbird, and possibly the SMP version of the athlon
   boards to become available (1-3 months guessing).

Personally one of the nicer kt133a boards+1.0 ghz cpu(/266) is looking
really attractive right now.  A couple memory places are selling 256 MB dimms
for $80 ish.

In any case the new amd systems have amazing price/performance, enjoy.


--
Bill