AMD's Athlon XP 3000+: Barton cuts it close

Final Words

AMD's first CPU of the year and it's still not the elusive Hammer, but as the benchmarks show, it doesn't need to be. In many cases the Athlon XP 3000+ can outperform the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, while in others it manages to tie with Intel's flagship and yet in others it falls behind just as much. The overall performance is close enough to warrant the 3000+ rating in some cases, but there's no question that it is a very close call between the two top performing CPUs. Looking at the CPU scaling charts alone you can get an idea for how competitive the two CPU families have become, as the Pentium 4 improved in performance and the Athlon XP continued to mature.

The areas in which the Athlon XP does quite well, including the new Barton core, are its conventional strong points; in business applications it dominates the Pentium 4, showing off a very conservative model rating, in games the chip is quite competitive with Intel but once we shift to the newer multimedia, encoding and rendering environments the Athlon XP is no longer able to do so well. This goes back to AMD's philosophy of building the best hardware to run software without requiring much optimization, unfortunately for their teams in Austin, a lot of the multimedia, encoding and rendering applications we're talking about are very Pentium 4-friendly these days. Then we have the issue of workloads that benefit from Hyper-Threading, an area we did not stress much in this review but one that carries much potential to differentiate the Athlon XP from the Pentium 4. When Prescott hits with its improved Hyper-Threading and larger caches that are conducive to better HT performance, it will be interesting to see how negative AMD remains on Intel's latest feature.

It is very interesting to note the relatively small performance improvement that resulted from the additional L2 cache, at least when you compare the impact of Barton to the impact Northwood had on the Pentium 4. We have to wonder if the added L2 cache and its accompanying 17 million transistors is worth it for the Athlon XP at this point; but with increasing clock speed becoming quite difficult without SOI or 90nm and no desire to add any additional functionality to the K7 architecture with Hammer just around the corner, those 17 million transistors may have been the simplest ticket to improving performance (as strange as that may sound).

With Barton launched, the focus once again shifts to Athlon 64 but we have a feeling it will be a very close battle throughout 2003 for AMD and Intel. The Athlon 64 may unequivocally tilt the balance in favor of AMD, but then there's Prescott to worry about. If the 512KB improvement numbers were any indication, moving to a full 1MB L2 cache in Prescott, combined with a larger L1 cache and improved Hyper-Threading could make for a powerful competitor. Between now and then, AMD will have to contend with not higher clock speeds, but much higher performing platforms as Intel readies their line of Springdale and Canterwood 800MHz FSB chipsets for launch in the second quarter.

Barton will keep AMD in the game, but Hammer is still quite necessary...