Athlon "Thunderbird" performance.

The main reasoning for AMD adding 256 Kb of Level 2 cache onto the processor core was primarily to improve performance, or at least to give the Athlon a consistent rise in performance as clock speed rose. This has now been achieved.

Unfortunately at the time of writing, we have not been able to benchmark the Athlon "Thunderbird" independently, so we will refer you to Anandtech, Tom's Hardware and Ace's Hardware as these sites provide a large number of benchmarks for the "Thunderbird".

Overall the Athlon "Thunderbird" shows an improvement over the original Athlon processor as regards performance, but not by the margins that many AMD afficionados has hoped for. The general rule of thumb with the Athlon "Thunderbird" is that it has provided a 5-10% increase in performance over an equivalent clock speed K75 Athlon. In our opinion this is an impressive development of the K7 architechture, as gaining 5-10% performance for no increase in clock speed is an impressive achievement. Many have looked to the significant performance gains made by Intel's ageing P6 architechture with the release of the "Coppermine" Pentium III, and expected the same from "Thunderbird".

As regards Integer performance (typified by Business Applications), the Athlon "Thunderbird" has now been able to close the gap between itself and Intel's "Coppermine" Pentium III processor.

The area where the Athlon retains a clear lead over it's Intel counterpart is still Floating Point (x87) applications. Again the Triple-pipelined Floating Point Unit of the Athlon is proving to be more of a match for the semi-pipelined FPU of Intel's ageing P6 architechture. 3DNow! instructions, like Intel's SSE, do not make much of an impact as the number of applications which take advantage of them are still limited.

Overall the Athlon "Thunderbird" and Intel's "Coppermine" Pentium III display simlar performance, with it appears the Athlon "Thunderbird" just gaining an edge over SDRAM powered (we do not yet regard Rambus RDRAM PIII systems as legitimate competitors due to poor availability) "Coppermine" Pentium III systems.

Conclusion.

Overall AMD have improved the Athlon by incorporating 256 Kb Level 2 cache onto the processor core. This does boost performance over older Athlons such as the K75. It manages to claw back the performance lead that Intel's "Coppermine" Pentium III was beginning to show at higher clock speeds over the Athlon.

We would recommend the Athlon "Thunderbird" to performance PC users, especially if AMD continues to price it lower than equivalent Intel Pentium III chips and if AMD can assure supply. If Intel continues to have supply problems with the Pentium III, the Athlon "Thunderbird" will surely do well as it can more than adequately fill the gap Intel leaves in the market.

The only problem we can see for the Athlon "Thunderbird" is competition from it's smaller sibling the Duron at lower clock speeds. The Duron is reportedly able to deliver 95% of K75 performance, and with it running at speeds just below that of the Athlon "Thunderbird" it may tempt home-buyers away from the Athlon like the Celeron did with the Pentium II. How AMD manages it's own product lines will be interesting indeed.

Athlon Thunderbird - Page 2.