AMD Athlon 850

The 50MHz clock speed increase over the Athlon 800 keeps the 850 at the top of the CC Winstone 2000 charts. Using a SuperBypass enabled AMD 750 setup, the 850 system slightly distances itself from the same chip on a KX133 motherboard. But the performance difference is far from noticeable.

Clock for clock, the Athlon is faster than the Pentium III when used on either the VIA or BX platforms, simply because the amount of available memory bandwidth on all four platforms (Athlon-750, Athlon-KX133, VIA and BX) is virtually the same across the board. Once the i820 with RDRAM is brought into the equation, the balance is tilted in favor of Intel because of the memory bandwidth advantage RDRAM holds over PC133 and PC100 SDRAM. But if you factor in the cost of RDRAM over PC133/PC100 SDRAM, the performance advantage isn't worth it at all.

In spite of the fact that the Athlon features a 2/5 speed L2 cache, it still remains quite competitive in comparison to the Pentium III with its full speed on-die L2.