AMD's Athlon XP 2100+ (1.73GHz)

Author : Martyn Date : 13th March '02

...Product	AMD Athlon XP 2100+
...Manufacturer	AMD
...Supplier	AMD
...Price	TBC

 

 

Presented below is a table of comparison between the Athlon XP and the Intel Pentium 4.

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Feature	Athlon XP	Intel Pentium 4
QuantiSpeed™ Architecture	Yes	No
Operations per clock cycle	9	6
Integer pipelines	3	4
Floating point pipelines	3	2
Full x86 decoders	3	1
L1 Cache Size	128K	12k µop (Trace Cache) + 8KB (Data Cache)
L2 Cache Size	256KB (on-chip)	256KB (on-chip
Total on-chip full-speed cache	384KB	64KB + 12k µop
Total effective on-chip full-speed cache	384KB (exclusive)	256KB - 12k µop (inclusive)
System bus speed	266MHz	400MHz
3D Enhancement instructions	3DNow!™ Professional	SSE2
Cache/prefetch controls	Yes	Yes
Streaming controls	Yes	Yes
DSP/comm extensions	Yes	Yes

The Athlon series clearly has a subjective feature lead. The cache of the XP chips far exceeds the comparative performance offered by the competitors chip. In fact the only deficit the XP suffers is the total system bandwidth. Utilizing the 266MHz frontside bus to ensure compatibility with most available system chipsets, it would appear that the P4 series of chips have a huge lead here but we must also consider that the P4's FSB is actually Quad-pumped, translating to 100MHz x 4. It will be interesting to see the P4 performance now DDR based chipsets are available for the aforementioned chip.

 

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