Manufacturer:
Price: $200

Thanks to for supplying us with a review sample!




Introduction

Today O� takes a closer look at the fastest AMD Athlon CPU out there: the one that comes in a 1.4GHz flavor. With the new Athlon, better known as the Palomino, coming out soon, this is the last "Thunderbird" Athlon that will see the light of day, as the new Athlon "Palomino" will debut in September 2001 with an entrylevel speed of 1.33GHz/1.4GHz. Is the current Athlon dead meat? Not at all!! This CPU is still very much alive and its performance can compete with the most powerful processors currently available! Over the years, two to be exact, AMD has managed to over double the speed of the Athlon core from 650MHz to 1400MHz!��The engineers over at Advanced Micro Devices have really made a good processor, as it is still king of the hill two years later.

Like I previously mentioned, the Athlon "Palomino" is coming soon.��But the real question is, should I wait for it and postpone buying a new Athlon CPU today?��It depends on what you plan on doing with your processor actually. A big reason why you should get a Palomino is because the new Palomino core outputs less heat, giving you more breathing room as far as cooling is concerned.

Now what makes the Athlon "Palomino" different from the current Athlon? The new one has a slightly larger core, from 120mm� to 128mm� to be exact.��And it has been tweaked quite efficiently, now offering more features and the above-mentioned heat output reduction. Another good addition to the Palomino is a thermal diode. At the moment we measure CPU temps with the diode that sits underneath the CPU on the motherboard. With the new Athlon CPU, there is a diode inside the CPU core, which will result in much more accurate temperature monitoring!

Another difference between both cores is that the Palomino carries extra 3DNow! instructions (SSE compatible) and also that the Palomino will be equiped with Data Pre-fetch on the cache memory.

AMD released the 1.4GHz Athlon as a powerful multimedia processor that should be capable of running everything you throw at it without any hick-ups. And that is what we are testing today! Interested on how this little adventure ends? Read on!