400MHz Bus by Athlon XP: Soon Officially

Let’s have a look at the processor market today and find out what’s going on over there. At present the fastest Intel Pentium 4 processor for the desktop segment reached the top of 3GHz, these CPUs feature 512KB of L2 cache memory, support 800MHz bus and Hyper-Threading technology. The today’s Pentium 4 CPUs are based on Northwood core manufactured with 0.13micron copper interconnect technology. The competing product from AMD, Athlon XP 3000+, works at the actual frequency of 2.167GHz, features 512KB L2 cache and supports 333MHz bus. The top Athlon XP models are based on Barton core manufactured with 0.13micron copper interconnect technology. However, despite pretty diverse features sets both processors do not differ too much in performance in real applications. The thing is that both rivals, Pentium 4 and Athlon XP, boast very different architecture. These processors feature different number of execution units and different pipelines that is why it is absolutely impossible to compare these CPUs with one another from the working frequency point of view.

The nearest future looks almost the same for both CPU makers. Northwood core, as well as Barton, have almost reached their top clock frequency. Both, AMD and Intel, will be able to launch only one more CPU model working at a higher clock rate, which will be based on 0.13micron cores. Within the next month or two we will see the new Pentium 4 3.2GHz on Northwood core and Athlon XP 3200+ on Barton core.

According to the initial plan, in the beginning of April AMD was going to launch the first processors from the first 64bit desktop processor family: Athlon 64. Due to their enhanced architecture, integrated memory controller and the ability to process 64bit code, Athlon 64 processors could become very popular among computer enthusiasts if they were available in the market (for more details and indepth tests of the real Athlon 64 processor see our exclusive article AMD Athlon 64 Performance Preview). The launching of Athlon 64 could easily shake Intel’s positions in the desktop market that is why the microprocessor giant had to resort to retaliatory measures aimed at speeding up their CPUs. Since the currently used Northwood core features limited potential in terms of clock frequency increase, Intel decided to go another way. First they introduced Hyper-Threading technology in Intel’s top processor models. This technology allowed using processor resources more efficiently due to the opportunity to process two threads simultaneously. Then Pentium 4 was transferred to 800MHz bus. As a result, its performance grew up a little bit.

However, AMD’s initial plans, which pushed Intel to these active measures never came true. At the very last moment AMD postponed the launch of their Athlon 64 processors from spring 2003 to fall 2003. This relatively strange (at first glance) decision was made because AMD had faced some technological problems. Although the yields for AMD Athlon 64 were quite high, the top clock frequency of the CPUs hardly exceeded 2GHz, so that the performance of the new solutions couldn’t exceed that of the currently available Athlon XP processors. To increase the core frequency AMD is now working on a new Athlon 64 core revision, while Athlon XP Barton will have to defend AMD’s current position in the processor market.