AMD's Athlon XP: Great performance, poor marketing

Final Words

While there was some debate as to which was faster, the Pentium 4 2.0GHz or Athlon-C 1.4GHz, the Athlon XP clearly establishes a performance lead over the competing Pentium 4 solutions. At 1.53GHz, the Athlon XP is able to consistently outperform the Pentium 4, partially due to the incredible performance of the retail KT266A motherboard that we paired it with. Especially in games such as Wolfenstein and Serious Sam, the idea of the Pentium 4 being the better gaming processor is clearly put to rest.

In most cases, the Pentium 4 is outperformed on the order of 10% which is exactly the performance enhancement the 512KB on-die L2 cache of Northwood is supposed to offer. If the first 2.2GHz Northwood based Pentium 4s are indeed delivered next month as we have been expecting, then AMD's reign as king with the Athlon XP may be short lived; at least until they can answer back with a higher clocked processor, but remember it's much more difficult for AMD to ramp in clock speed than it is for Intel because of architectural differences.

This flip flopping of performance leaders was quite uncommon between AMD and Intel in the past. If you'll remember back to a couple of years ago, the performance leader was consistently Intel, especially in gaming and professional level benchmarks while the value leader was AMD. One of the most honest quotes we ever received from an Intel employee (although not an official quote for obvious reasons) was in response to the question "Will Intel ever make a return to the level of dominance that existed a few years ago?" His response was on the order of, 'not as long as AMD continues to stay on the ball'. With the Athlon processor AMD finally had a powerful part on their hands and unless they seriously screw things up, you can expect to see this sort of heated competition between AMD and Intel for some time to come. You've got to admit it's definitely been good for the end users as we've never been blessed with such high performance CPUs at such very low prices.

Now we get to the issue of AMD's new performance rating system. If you haven't gathered already, the performance ratings do little justice to the Athlon XP platform. We've already proven that they don't correspond to real world performance (the CPUs considerably exceed the real world performance implied by the ratings) and those that are targeted by the ratings could potentially become more confused because of the ratings. It's very clear that AMD's Athlon XP can stand on its own merits without requiring a silly numbering system to "educate" the uninformed. In reality it's misleading the uninformed. How hard would it have been to present the results of those 14 benchmarking applications rather than devise a modeling system that confuses more than it helps? And what happens if AMD is able to attain a clock speed parity with Intel, using the upcoming ClawHammer CPU for example? Will we see even higher ratings on CPUs, defeating the purpose of using this rating system to level the clock speed playing field between AMD and Intel? The unfortunate answer is probably yes.

We understand what AMD is trying to accomplish with the rating system, but from our perspective, the Athlon XP is a strong enough product on its own to survive and excel without the use of such a system. There are much better ways to educate the masses.