Comdex 2002 - Day 2: Intel's CPU Roadmap & Hammer Performance

Athlon 64 Running Smoothly @ 1.4GHz

Yesterday we reported that the Athlon 64 samples at Comdex were running at 1.4GHz, today we were able to spend a little more time with those systems and even got some feel for its performance.

The first thing to point out is that AMD's chipset is currently not running AGP 8X with much stability, unfortunately that also means that other chipset vendors that borrowed AMD's 8X design are having issues as well. On the bright side, NVIDIA's CK8 chipset is working just fine with AGP 8X enabled.

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The system we played around with was running AMD's own Athlon 64 chipset but obviously in AGP 4X mode. The heatsink was lukewarm at best while the system was running 3DMark 2001 SE, clearly a testament to how beneficial Silicon on Insulator is. The system was quite stable and never crashed while we were using it; it was running a regular copy of Windows XP Professional.

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The performance of the Athlon 64 at 1.4GHz was around the speed of a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP 2200+, at least in the 3DMark tests we ran. Obviously this isn't an indication of final performance but it does give you an idea of where AMD is headed. If they can reach the 2.0GHz clock speeds they are shooting for then the Athlon 64 could be quite a competitive part. Judging by the stability of the system we played with, AMD's only issue right now is getting clock speeds up. Coming from 800MHz at Computex to 1.4GHz today, AMD is getting there but they've still got a long road ahead.

Final Words

That's all for now, be sure to check back later for more show coverage and sign up for our Newsletter to get all of the updates as soon as we get them.