AthlonXP 2600+ 333FSB CPU - Features
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Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Product: | AMD AthlonXP 2600+ 333 FSB Review |
Price: | USD$286 |
Availability: | NOW |
Reviewed By: | Jim "Justi" Miller |
Review Date: | February 2003 |
AMD AthlonXP 2600+ 333 FSB Review
FEATURES:
The AthlonXP 2600+ at 333FSB (or any of the 333 processors by AMD) really don't offer any additional "features" over the other Thoroughbred CPU's other than of course the increased bus speed. That said, let's take a look at a few of the flagship features of the Thoroughbred core line of CPU's.
QuantiSpeed Architecture:
- 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
Basically what all this means is that AMD has tweaked the heck out of their instructions to be able to handle applications, according to them, better than the competition. Is that the case? Well, we'll see when we get to the benchmarks section of this review.
3DNow!™ Professional Technology:
- 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 2000, Windows ME, and Windows 98 operating systems
3DNow! is something AMD came up with years ago to to combat Intel's SSE instruction sets and it has stuck, remaining on every AMD CPU since. Basically it does exactly what it's name implies, it boosts performance of 3D applications.
333Mhz Bus Speed:
- Source synchronous clocking (clock forwarding) technology
- Peak data rate of 2.7GB/s
- Support for 64-bit bi-directional data
Now here's one that speaks for itself. With the addition, or should I say upgrade to, the 333Mhz front side bus AMD has effectively raised the throughput which always is a good thing to the end user.
There are more features but these are what I feel to be the important ones. If you're the type of person that just craves knowledge I suggest heading over the AMD's website and have a field day with white papers. :)
BENCHMARKS:
CPU benchmarks are always the hardest to show in my opinion because realistically the only viable benchmarks available are synthetic, and we hate to rely solely on those. What I would suggest is that you download the exact benchmark software and revision that I use here and run it on your own system and compare the scores. That way you'll be able to judge where the value for an upgrade is based on raw numbers against YOUR system. That's the only advantage to synthetics is that they're easier to compare outside of the test bench the tests are being run on.
TEST SYSTEMS:
AMD System:
Pentium4 System:
Basically the two systems are identical except for the motherboard and processor for obvious reasons. The AMD xp2600+ checks in at 2080Mhz (12.5x166), overclocked it's 2495Mhz (15x166). The P4 is 2400Mhz default and at 3.03Ghz overclocked (18x168).
To benchmark these CPU's we'll be using the CPU arithmetic and multimedia benchmarks from SiSoft Sandra 03 basic, PiFast (a program that measures the time for a CPU to calculate Pi, and Futuremark's 3dMark2001 (Build 330). The inclusion of 3dMark was up in the air because it is a 3D application primarily. However, because we know so many of you judge things by its braggable 3dMark capabilities and the fact is also is dependant on CPU speed, we decided to leave it in.
Let's start with the SiSoft Sandra suite of benchmarks:
SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic Bench:
What we see here is the beginning of an apparent trend. The Pentium 4 which is actually clocked over 300Mhz higher was handily beat by the 2600+ at default speed, and the overclocked 2600+ broke about even with the P4 at over 3Ghz. It killed it in ALU and lost out in FPU.
Let's head to page 3 and look at the rest of the benchmarks...
Next: Benchmarks >>
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