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AMD Athlon XP 1700+


Date
: 10/15/01 – 10:06:13 PM

Author
:

Category
: Processors

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: AMD
Price: $170

Introduction

Two days ago, AMD released the most anticipated product since June last summer. You all know what I am talking about: the Athlon XP. For those of you who have no clue what I'm saying (shame on you!): the Athlon XP, codenamed "Palomino", is actually a ramped up Athlon "Thunderbird" processor, equipped with new hardware instructions, lower heat emitting levels and other interesting features I'll discuss further in the review.

With the Athlon XP, AMD has introduced a "rating" for each model. What does this mean? Well, AMD is now labelling their processors with a rated speed. Instead of selling them as a 1.47GHz cpu, they sell it as a 1700+ cpu because it will perform as fast as a 1.7GHz Athlon Thunderbird processor.

Those of you who have been around in the hardware community for some time will remember this rating stunt … does the name "Cyrix" ring a bell? Cyrix, once a fair competitor of Intel was selling cpu's at rated speeds as well (back in the days of the Pentium I cpu's). Today no one is talking about Cyrix anymore, except to make fun of it of course. AMD won't go bankrupt because of this, but chances are that people will feel mislead by all this rated numbers.

We at Overclockers Online dug out some serious benchmarking tools, torturing tests and graphical violence in order to find out if AMD is telling the truth about their new rated Athlon XP. Let the show begin …

Page 2 : Specifications

Specifications

With the release of a new processor, new specs are expected. The bright team of engineers at AMD is very much aware of this and they did their very best to cramp the XP with a truckload of features to make it faster, more powerful, cooler, … you name it. Let?s look at a short description of the Athlon XP, written by AMD.

QuantiSpeed? Architecture for enhanced performance

- 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
- 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 98, Windows 95, and Windows NT® 4.x operating systems

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
- The AMD Athlon? XP processor with performance-enhancing cache memory features 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.

- 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 128mm2. Manufactured using AMD's state-of-the-art 0.18-micron copper process technology at AMD's Fab 30 wafer fabrication facility in Dresden, Germany.

Now let us look at all these specifications and find out what they can do for us! Most parts of these explanations are taken from the AMD tech sheets or other AMD resources. Why? They built and invented it, so they know best how to describe the new features. Of course I have added my own comments throughout all the information, so the descriptions below are a mix of both my thoughts and AMD's white papers. First, let?s look at the QuantiSpeed Architecture? that has been implemented into the Athlon XP, and which should result in a powerful boost of performance.

The QuantiSpeed? Architecture

The QuantiSpeed? architectureallows the AMD Athlon? XP processor to accomplish more instructions per clock cycle (IPC). This is what AMD uses to rate their processors at a certain speed. In order to calculate the performance of the Athlon XP, AMD uses the following equation:

Performance = IPC (work per clock cycle) x MHz (clock speed)

Many people are asking themselves … why didn't AMD implement this rating system any sooner? Well, here is AMD's story: up to the 486 cpu, both AMD and Intel were using the same IPC power, so the only difference in performance was the clock speed. Starting with the fifth generation cpu's, both companies went their own way. They took distance from each other, to end up were they are today: far away from each other, resulting it different IPC's for their processors. Since we learned from the performance equation above, the IPC has a lot to do with how a cpu performs. AMD claims that their IPC is far better than Intel's one, so this would mean that an AMD Athlon XP needs less MHz power than e.g. an Intel P4 to achieve the same results. In theory they are correct, but only benchmarks can tell the truth …

If we think about some of the most powerful cpu's out there, we discover that there definitely is some truth in the performance equation. The Alpha processors from Compaq run at 1001MHz, IMB RS/6000 runs at 450MHz, Apple's top end cpu reaches 800MHz (or did they get to 1GHz after all) … all of the previously listed cpu's are still used in today's most powerful machines, and when we look at their clock speed, we notice that none of them even reaches 1GHz.

- Nine-issue, superscalar, fully pipelined microarchitecture: Provides more pathways to feed application instructions into the execution engines of the core, allowing the processor to complete more work in a given clock cycle (high IPC). The delicate balance between the depth of the pathways and clock speed of the processor produces high levels of performance.

- Superscalar, fully pipelined Floating Point Unit (FPU): Completes more floating point operations per clock cycle than competitive x86 processors and permits high operating frequencies. The end result is a processor with the computing power to tackle the most computation-intensive software applications.

- Hardware data prefetch: Prefetches data from system memory to the processor's Level 1 cache, which reduces the time it takes to feed the processor critical data, increasing work throughput and therefore overall performance.

- Exclusive and speculative Translation Look-aside Buffers (TLBs): Keep the maps to critical data close to the processor, which helps prevent the processor from stalling or waiting when future data is requested. These TLB structures are now larger, exclusive between caches, and speculative. Larger TLB's give the AMD Athlon XP processor access to additional data maps. Exclusivity removes the duplication of information, freeing up more space in the Level 2 cache for other useful data to be used by the processor. And the speculative nature of these structures allows the processor to generate future maps of critical data quickly.

These four key advances allow QuantiSpeed architecture to perform more calculations per second, boosting overall productivity and enabling an ultimate computing experience. Now let?s have a brief look at the other new features we are getting …

AMD added 19 new 3DNow! instructions to the Athlon XP, resulting in better performance for integer calculations. This means that multimedia programs like streaming video and audio will be enhanced. Apart from that, 52 new SSE instructions are included which you will benefit from in FPU applications, like for example, Quake3 and other games. Should be nice heh? Those are the most important additions, but there are more. If you want to read every single detail about the new instructions, go read the white papers at AMD. Now the 3DNow! set is called 3DNow! Professional Technology.

With the arrival of the Athlon XP, AMD says goodbye to the 100MHz/200MHz DDR front side bus. The new "Palomino's" are only to be used with a 133MHz/266MHz DDR bus speed, which means the cpu can handle 2.1GB/s. The cache size hasn't been changed since the TBird, which means that the Palomino/Athlon XP has a total of 384kB of cache memory: 128kB level-1 and 256kB level-2.

Of course AMD could not let the upcoming release of Windows XP go unattended … coincidence or not, the new Athlon is called Athlon XP. Unlike with the OS, where the XP stands for eXPierence, the "XP" in Athlon XP stands for eXtra Performance. We'll see about that in the benchmarks …

To conclude our spec talk, I want to say something about the cpu itself. The Athlon XP has 0.5 million more transistors when compared to the old Athlon, a total of 37.5 million to be exact. The die size was not shrinked, but nevertheless AMD manages to reduce heat emission by 20%!! The processor also comes with a thermal diode, but not many motherboards support that today … we'll see more of those in the future.

Page 3 : Overclocking

Overclocking

In the past AMD has always been very overclocker minded. Remember the GFD's or Gold Finger Devices we used to plug onto the Slot A Athlons? Later on, when AMD released the socket A cpu's, people quickly discovered that they could easily unlock their processor by connecting the L1 bridges.

With the new Athlon XP processors, unlocking the cpu will still work (to a certain level) but it is much more complicated and harder to do so. I suggest that you take a look at this website called OC AthlonXP … it has a complete and detailed how-to on unlocking the new XP processors.

The above paragraph is the main reason why I decided not to include a full force overclocking section into this review. I did not have enough time between receiving the sample and posting this review to explore all the options. So what I did was overclock the cpu by the front side bus only, and that got me to 1630MHz rock stable. Note that I didn't use extreme cooling but just a good air-cooled heatsink, namely the Vantec CCK-6035D. The BIOS reports this cpu as a 1900+ … No 2000+ yet, but I'm sure that with a little help from our good friend H2O, 2000+ won't be a problem. What got my attention is that the XP cpu produces less heat that the TBird … the Vantec isn't hot to touch whereas it feels pretty warm when running it on a TBird @ 1.5GHz.

Since I didn't overclock the cpu a lot, I didn't include the overclocking results in the benchmarks, but I did run a quick batch of 3D Mark 2001 … Look at the pic to see what I got with the default benchmark :).

Page 4 : Benchmarking

Benchmarking

Since AMD included several new features into the Athlon XP, we expected to see some improvements in the benchmarks as well … Want to know what happened? Read on and be amazed!

First let?s look at the test setup:

- AMD AthlonXP 1700+ (1.47GHz)
- EPoX 8KHA+ KT266A
- 2x128MB PC2100 Crucial DDR
- Western Digital 20GB
- VisionTek GeForce 3
- Accton NIC
- Windows 2000 + SP2 + VIA 4.33 + Detonator 21.81

The setup is made public … lets get the show on the road shall we?

Sisoft Sandra Benchmark Suite

CPU Benchmark

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

When we inspect the above bars, we notice that the XP is pulling away at high velocity from the competition. The XP outperforms the P4 at higher speeds, but the Thunderbird did that already so nothing new here … the difference just got bigger.

Memory Benchmark

Apparently AMD managed to improve the way the Athlon takes care of the memory as well. Just look at the memory benchmarks. The XP creams the older TBird Athlon by a good margin! Of course it is no match for the P4 2.0GHz teamed up with RDRAM …

MadOnion 3D Mark 2001

16-bit

32-bit

The saga continues with 3D Mark … Again the Athlon XP shows its muscles, ramping up the expected scores by approximately 10%. Way to go AMD!

Quake 3: Arena

Demo 001

Torture Demo

Quake 3 belonged to the Intel camp a long time but the XP changed all that. I know that we compared the Athlon XP with the XP drivres to the P4 with the 12.90 drivers. If you look at the tests you see that the Athlon XP with the XP drivers outperforms the TBird with the XP drivers by a large margin. As soon as we got out P4 sample back we'll add P4 tests with the XP drivers but don't expect the P4 to win the battle. Stay tuned for the update here!

All in all the Athlon XP manages to put down some very sweet numbers … It seems that AMD wasn't making things up with their claims heh? On to the conclusion …

Page 5 : Conclusion

Conclusion

What more can I say? The Athlon XP performed marvellous and has become or number one choice because it offers the best performance/price ratio. Although the Athlon "Palomino" XP is only a pass-through processor (with the Thoroughbred processors being released Q102) it is an excellent choice for today's high performance computers. Our benchmarks are not lying … and be aware of the fact that we used an Athlon XP 1700+ not the 1800+, which would produce even greater results. The only downside on the Palomino is that unlocking it has become more difficult compared to its older brother, the Thunderbird … but than again … the competition hardlocks its cpu's so I don't think we have something to complain about. Another strong point about the Athlon XP is it's compatibility with existing socket A motherboards (at least with most of them, sometimes with a BIOS update).

Having all this said, I am happy to give this processor the official O² Power Award.

Good

- Performance
- Price
- Compatible with socket A platform
- Less heat

Bad

- Harder to unlock.
- Produces more heat than the competition.