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AMD Hardware

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Released 231

Posted by Hemos from the tide-goes-in-tide-goes-out dept.
SpinnerBait writes "AMD took the wraps off their next speed bump with the Barton core, the Athlon XP 3200+. This CPU runs with a 400MHz Front Side Bus at 2.2GHz and is targeted at competing toe to toe with Intel's latest P4. The benchmarks and review over at HotHardware, look pretty good but Intel's 3GHz/800MHz FSB P4 variant seems to squeak past it here and there. Regardless, more of that "yin" to compete with Intel's "yang" was released today by AMD and consumers will benefit again from the competition."
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AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Released More

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Released

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  • It's also the last 32 bit Athlon. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pop n' Fresh ( 411094 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:47AM (#5943825)
    "AMD took the wraps off their next speed bump with the Barton core, the Athlon XP 3200+."

    It's also going to be the LAST speed bump with the Barton core. AMD's next Athlon is going to be 64 bits:

    http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-1001106.html?tag =fd_lede1_hed

  • Oh man...winter just ended... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MeanE ( 469971 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:49AM (#5943838) Homepage
    and I already had bought a space heater.

    • Re:Oh man...winter just ended... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Schezar ( 249629 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:11AM (#5943955) Homepage Journal
      You know, AMD procs don't have the heat problems they used to have. If they overheat your case, it's usually due to a poorly made case or some other factor. Like, say, a modern video card... -_-
      • Humm ....

        Maybe you should read the original posters comments again. He did not say anything about "overheating" the proc. In fact he is dead on when he mentions space heater because of the massive heat exchange that would take place with two overclocked Athlons in the same case.

        I run three-five boxes in my office at a time. In the winter the rest of my house is around 72 F. My office is a toasty 78F from the heat dispensed from the boxes. Great space heaters.

        I am not saying what you mentioned to be

  • poor AMD (Score:3, Funny)

    by MacOS_Rules ( 170853 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:51AM (#5943854) Homepage
    ...compete with Intel's "yang"...

    Poor AMD, releasing a faster proc just because they feel...inadaquate...

    I bet they drive SUVs too. A shame, really.

  • Athlon rating system over-rated? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Imabug ( 2259 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:57AM (#5943883) Homepage Journal
    Based on what I've read of the 3200+ at Tom's Hardware and Tech Report, the CPU performance is good, just slightly better than the 3000+, but still gets trumped by the P4 3.0 and 3.06 CPUs. Both call into question the validity of AMD's CPU rating system, and judging from their benchmarks, rightly so. The 3200+ is also supposed to be more expensive than the P4s, which combined with the dissapointing performance may limit it's popularity.

    It will be interesting to see how the 3200+ performs when overclocked.

    • Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:02AM (#5943909)
      Both call into question the validity of AMD's CPU rating system

      Unofficially perhaps, but officially the comparison isn't to Intel chips, but to AMD's older Thunderbird processors. A 3200+ is supposed to give about the same performance a tbird would, if it was clocked to 3.2GHz.
      • Okay -- for the AMD fanboys out there -- what would you do if Intel tried that exact same line of reasoning on you? (Of course, they don't have to, since they've got the fastest chip on the block.)

        • Re:Athlon rating system over-rated? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by turgid ( 580780 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:15AM (#5943983) Journal
          Well, say intel used a performance rating to compare the P4 to a PIII, and took the 1GHz PIII as the baseline. Since the Pentium 4 does a lot less per clock cycle than the PIII, they'd probably have to call their P IV 3.0GHz a "P IV 2300+" or something.
        • Of course, they don't have to, since they've got the fastest chip on the block.

          Yep, they have. But I find it interesting that if both chips were running the same true clockspeed, the AMD would be faster. It leads me to believe that Intel rely far more on being able to ramp up their clockspeed than they do on creating a better chip. For that reason alone I prefer AMD.
          • It leads me to believe that Intel rely far more on being able to ramp up their clockspeed than they do on creating a better chip.

            That's silly reasoning. You could also rationalize this by saying that AMD is incapable of making a chip that runs at 3 GHz and is therefore inferior.

            • Okay, explain why the Intel isn't of similar performance at the same clockspeed? Especially considering Intel's vastly superior R&D and financial support.
              • Because Intel found that the best way to improve overall performance is to increase the clock speed, even at the expense of making the per-clock performance worse.

                They are right too: where has almost all of the increases in performance come from? Not from doubling the number of instructions processed per clock every 18 months, that is for sure.

                • The reason they doubled the clock speed rather than doubling the number of instructions executed is that OoO becomes more difficult and the complexity goes up. Hence the higher speeds. Unfortunately, aiming for higher speeds instead of more efficient operation in the first place meant a longer pipeline which meant you need better branch prediction and it apparently just didn't get it, or we're reaching some theoretical limit of branch prediction. Which I doubt, considering Intel has become the Microsoft of
                  • Well, until a year or two ago the Intel approach was undeniably the winner. That is how they managed to get to be king of the hill in the first place. But for sure, branch prediction has huge theoretical limits. Consider:

                    while (1) { if (rand() % 2) foo(); else bar(); }

                    How do you branch-predict that? Beyond simple for-loops (predict correctly N times in a row, predict wrong exactly once at the end of the loop) it gets very difficult.

                    But branch-prediction is only one part of the total pipeline

      • I'm sorry but I'm calling bullshit. I am sick and tired of some marketing dept. deciding that today they're going to re-write what commonly accepted words/comparisons mean.

        It's called deceptive advertising.

        Plain & simple. Intel makes processors. Their competitor is AMD. A reasonable person would expect that as they are competitiors any "marketing friendly" term used to describe speed is comparing apples to apples. The layman is not a computing expert. It is reasonable for them to assume that a AMD X
      • A 3200+ is supposed to give about the same performance a tbird would, if it was clocked to 3.2GHz.

        If this is really true, then the AMD engineering rep that I talked to got it wrong. He sayd that the rating was in comparison with the most directly equivalent MHz/GHz Intel chip. He said _nothing_ about the older AMD processors, and I would think such a comparison wouldn't be easy to make or relevant. It might also show that a 3.2GHz P4 might not have any gains over a 3GHz version. Or the series of bench
    • I have long suspected that the industry standard benchmarks have gotten a bit crazy in the past year. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9445 [theinquirer.net] does a pretty good Job sumarizing my thoughts. The benchmarks don't add up. Last year's WinWhatever benchmarks give totally different results than this year's, even on new hardware. I actually think that AMD is *trying* to be genuine with their rating system, but I also think that special interests have corrupted mainstream benchmarks to make them an unusuable g
      • I actually think that AMD is *trying* to be genuine with their rating system, but I also think that

        Consider:

        Athlon 2600XP+ - 2133MHz
        Athlon 2800XP+ - 2166MHz

        You call that genuine? A 1.5% increase in clockspeed somehow equals 7.5% perfomance increase??
      • >special interests have corrupted
        >mainstream benchmarks to make them an
        > unusuable guide.

        This is true, to a certain extent!
        People used to benchmark with, say,
        Office scripts or other "office" jobs.

        Most modern benchmarks are almost
        100% multimedia (Internet content
        creation, Divx, MP3 photoshop etc
        come to mind). This is very convenient
        for Intel because P4 is a multimedia
        design (long pipes, high MHz, small
        cache, fast FSB, SSE2) designed for
        serial operations (small loops, no
        bran
    • haha, Tom is Intel shop, and pretty lame at that one, too.
      Just look at his arrangements and you'll easily see what is wrong with them.
    • You should look at TCO, and I'm not just talking about support. RDRam is rediculous, and a complete p4 system ends costing a lot more than a comparable athlon. HotHardware.com did say it overclocked well, up to 2520mhz, a 13% increase, and 320mhz.

      I'm waiting for a x86-64.
  • No! They did benchmarks using Quake3 again. Who cares about Quake3 performance?

    How about useful benchmarks - can I have a 10 plane dogfight over the front line in a Falcon 4SP campaign at 40fps+ with all the settings maxed out? My guess is no.
    • Duh, because Quake3 is one of the very few engines that scales well with faster processors. It pretty much runs as fast as your CPU and graphics can handle because it's written down at the bare metal level.

      It's a more "raw" benchmark than the rest of the games out there. Other games often have many strange and bizarre bottlenecks due to the way there were written.

      The Q3 benchmark is not about showing how fast the game is. It's about showing how fast the processor is compared to older versions.
    • Technically, FPS is likely to be more limited by your GPU than the processor. In these benchmarks, the CPU is going to spend more time compressing textures, shifting data around, and trying to push data down the AGP bus than anything else. I'll be more impressed when they start using software rendering when they do these benchmarks.

      Realistically, almost all of these game based benchmarks are crap. If you want real statistics, have it render CGI movie frames. THEN see how it compares to other CPUs. Until yo

  • Better benchmarks.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:58AM (#5943890)
    Here [tomshardware.com]

    • And it is brown! (Score:4, Informative)

      by leuk_he ( 194174 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:11AM (#5943952) Homepage Journal
      [hexus.net]
      HEXUS reckons a 200MHz front side bus can't hurt. here. There's a picture of a brown semiconductor, also known as the "brains of a computer".

      TOM'S HARDWARE has a controversial conclusion about the 3200+ and describes it as a "spineless paper tiger". It thinks the 3200+ is "much too aggressive" and it should be an XP2800+.

      [sudhian.com]
      SUDHIAN Some crazy looking geek at Sudhian (hi Joel), reckons that AMD is being a little coy with clock speeds while its PR speeds have rocketed skywards.

      [gamers.com]
      FIRING SQUAD says AMD's odyssey for the performance crown has been a little more treacherous than Her Indoors, but welcomes the introduction of the 3200+ and the 400MHz bus.

      [tech-report.com]
      TECH REPORT says there's not much new to report about the 2.2GHz chip apart from the fact that it runs on a 400MHz front side bus. But it reckons that the release is timely. There's a picture of a brown semiconductor which appears to resemble the brains of a computer.

      [lostcircuits.com]
      LOST CIRCUITS contrasts the real brown brains of a computer with the hypothetical 3200+ brains of a computer it previewed a month or two ago.

      [bit-tech.net]
      BIT-TECH reckons that AMD's finally released the processor that the 3000+ should have been, denies the site's too pro-Intel, and puts it through its paces. There's a picture of a brown chip which appears to be the brains of a computer.

      I stop whoring now, more to be found at amdzone [amdzone.com]

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:59AM (#5943893)
    Excellent, now I will finally be able to upgrade the chip on my homemade iLoo.

    • Re:Finally! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Schezar ( 249629 )
      " Excellent, now I will finally be able to upgrade the chip on my homemade iLoo."

      I had a cow chip. I was happy with it before, but I don't think it will cut it anymore when Doom ]|[ hits the shelves.

      I was thinking of going with the new Intel "Dungbeetle" core, but I've heard it has heat issues.
    • will the seat be heated to the point that you can't sit down anymore? Or will you use "flush cooling"?
      Inquiring minds want to know :)

  • Tom's Hardware: Paper tiger (Score:3, Informative)

    by geschild ( 43455 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:00AM (#5943900) Homepage

    Tom's Hardware isn't so positive in their review [tomshardware.com]. Quote from the conclusion:

    "XP 2800+ would have been a more realistic label for the processor, which wouldn't have been a problem for anyone, if AMD still wants to go toe-to-toe with Intel's P4."

    Oh well, the old adagium for benchmarks/statistics aplies I guess.
    • There was always this "Well, the AMD doesn't ACTUALLY run that fast, they just label it that way" thing going on.

      HOWEVER...

      Used to be, when you put an Intel head to head with the Equally-Labeled AMD, normally the AMD was up to or faster than the Intel chip.

      So, no problem. If the electric car runs as fast as a 3.2 liter combustion engine, you won't get any protest from me in labeling it as a "3.2 engine"

      But they are screwing up here. When you start over selling things, you make it difficult to trust yo

      • In answer to your question: the benchmarks say it isn't as fast as the Intel part they've put it up against so I'd have to agree with you.

        The surprise is in the price AMD is asking for this part. It's much lower than anticipated by the market. This could mean that AMD is well aware of the fact that this processor isn't up to snuff.

        The question remains why they would want to shoot themselves in the foot so badly then and 'over-lable' the part. Tom's HW is legitimatly (imo) asking AMD to relable the part bu

    • You know, I can't help but think AMD is shooting themselves in the toe by not making the labeling numbers not as close to their P4 counterparts as possible. If they were truely representative, you might hear people purchase them based on their marketing label, ie "Give me a 2800+" for a system that is to be about as fast as a P4 2.8GHz processor.

      Since the number don't really seem to match their true performance, people will discount them as innacurate and simple ask, "How many GHz is it?" (ie, "Should I b

      • I am not a big fan of AMD processors, but I value the competition and

        it's a shame the MHz myth cannot be shed so easily.

        And there you hit the nail on the head. The MHz myth is what hurting the cpu market more than anything else. This myth, much to the detriment of PPC, Sparc, hell even the venerable alpha keeps on having a bigger impact than anything on competition.

        The only solution seems to be to find a better way to compare apples and oranges in the processor world. Unfortunatly, great minds have trie

        • You know what would help PPC and SPARC even more than getting rid of the MHz Myth? Actually releasing processors that outperformed highly-clocked P4's in real benchmarks. MHz myth is one thing, but if your processors aren't keeping up in SPEC, that's something else.

          PS> I'm not comparing a SPARC *machine* to a P4, you Sun fanboys! High end SPARC's have systems architectures that blow away most PC's. But the CPU itself is a rather weak performer.

  • 3200+ reviews listed and related info (Score:4, Informative)

    by ruiner5000 ( 241452 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:03AM (#5943920) Homepage
    We have tons of Athlon XP 3200+ review links and related info here. [amdzone.com] It may be the last Athlon before Athlon 64 arrives.

  • Model Numbers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:07AM (#5943936) Journal
    From Tom's Hardware:
    XP 2800+ would have been a more realistic label for the processor, which wouldn't have been a problem for anyone, if AMD still wants to go toe-to-toe with Intel's P4.
    The model numbers are more less unrelated to reality now. It's becoming borderline fradulent.
    • I wish AMD would revert back to the simple "I am a processor that runs at 2.2GHz" or stamp processor speed and L2 cache size on the processor versus the 2xxx/3xxx rating system. The rating system is flawed and would only be "helpful" (at best) to those ignorant of AMD's performance advantage to Intel's at the same processor speed. This rating system would be useful if, and only if, AMD had a large presence in the commercial markets (i.e. Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, etc.)

      Otherwise, another trick that has
      • The slashdot crowd may be quite aware of the clock-for-clock performance advantage of AMD chips, but remember the public as a whole still has quite a few people who are trying to find the "any key" and think IE is their operating system.

        Your average consumer just sees the numbers on the box. That's why Intel made the P4 to ramp up quickly at the expense of per clock performance, and that's why AMD switched to their marketing labels.
        • These marketing labels mean very little to the typical ignorant consumer. Take for instance the infamous reply:

          Q: How fast is your computer?
          A: I dunno. I think it's about 30 gigabits.
        • While I'm sure marketing played a role in Intel's decision to make a highly clocked processor, it wasn't the only factor. The P4's design as an *engineering* decision. Intel realized that current code just wasn't very paralleizable, and decided to concentrate on clock speed. The P4's whole architecture is built around "streaming" data through the CPU as fast as possible. And you know what? This design works just great for the type of code the P4 is usually asked to run. What matters is the final benchmarks

      • "AMD Athlon XP 2200M/512K"

        Yeah, but will Joe Sixpack be able to remember the new important feature here, namely,

        "AMD Athlon XP 2200M/512K/400M FSB"

        It's drag. People want to be able to compare computers using One Number, despite the fact that one number does not fully characterize a computer.

    • The model numbers are more less unrelated to reality now. It's becoming borderline fradulent.

      Ahh, so it's so much better to have a P4 3.0GHz that is a faster chip than a P4 3.06GHz, or three different P4 2.4GHz chips that all have different performance characteristics?

      AMD just replaced one completely meaningless measure of performance (processor clock frequency) with another completely meaningless measure of performance (their model numbers).

      My only complaint with AMD's model number system with the

    • Re:Model Numbers (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Loki_1929 ( 550940 )
      "The model numbers are more less unrelated to reality now. It's becoming borderline fradulent."

      Show me the benchmarks from a Thunderbird-core Athlon running at 3.2GHz where it strongly outperforms the Barton-core 3200+ and I'll agree with you.

      AMD has maintained since the start of the model number system that the 1700+, 2200+ ratings are based on the estimated performance of a Thunderbird-core Athlon running at 1700MHz, 2200MHz, etc. respectively. That there is widescale (mis)use of the system by geeks to

  • From the article... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fok ( 449027 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @08:45AM (#5944181) Homepage
    The AMD Athlon(TM) XP processor with performance-enhancing cache memory features 64K instruction and 64K data caches for a total of 128K L1 cache and 512K of integrated, on-chip L2 cache for a total of 640K of full-speed, on-chip cache.

    So... will I be able to run MS-DOS programs directly from the processor cache? ;D
  • Wouldn't having a processor referred to as a speed bump be a 'bad thing'?

  • Biased benchmarks (Score:2, Informative)

    by edxwelch ( 600979 )
    I've just been reading this: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9445 [theinquirer.net] Very interesting claims about the validity of certain benchmarks. According to the inquirer the PC World bencharks are the only ones to be trusted. Also quite interesting what they are saying about how consumers have been ripped off for buying Celerons.

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wordsmith ( 183749 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @09:07AM (#5944371) Homepage
    "This CPU runs with a 400MHz Front Side Bus at 2.2GHz ..."

    Now -that's- overclocking.

  • Bajillion Ultra Hertz! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nick_davison ( 217681 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @11:51AM (#5946082)
    So, the logic behind AMD's naming structure was that, while their cores ran slower, their names gave you an idea of what speed a comparable Intel chip would run at. That meant a 2000+, while running significantly slower, produced about the same output as a 2GHz Pentium, etc.

    Now they have the 3200+ which runs... well a bit slower than the 3Ghz Pentium. It also runs at a 2.2Ghz core. So nowhere in any of its design does it really justify a 3200+ moniker. 3000+ is closer with 2950+ possibly being the most accurate, according to the benchmarks.

    If the n+ meaning has nothing to do with real world speeds, core speeds, relative speeds or any other kind of speed anymore, why don't they stop worry and just get on with calling it the "Bajillion Ultra Hertz!" model (note the important exclamation marks)?

    You know, I need to get myself a V8+ sticker for a Pinto.
  • OK, I just could not let this go.

    How exactly is AMD "yin" to Intel's "yang" ?

    Yin and yang can mean a variety of things, for instance,

    Yang:
    light
    male/masculine
    aggressive
    forceful
    powerful

    Yin:
    dark/shadowed
    female/feminine
    passive
    yielding

    So, in light of this definition, how would AMD fit as yin anything? The popular notion of yin and yang is simply that of opposites, which loosely gets applied to any competitors, which is incorrect.

  • How much does the XP 3200 and the P4 3000 cost?

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