This respectful German site was brave enough to share some results of the first AMD ClawHammer benchmarks. The tests were run on AMD Solo2 mainboard equipped with 256MB PC2700 DDR333 (2.5-3 memory timings) and a GeForce3 based graphics accelerator. It is surprising but the clock frequency of the tested piece made only 800MHz, which is twice as little as the CPU is expected to be by launch. So, I would say that the piece running over at MSI booth could be called even a good one, really. No wonder that AMD tries to refrain from sharing any performance results, because 800MHz is a way too low for a 0.13micron piece. :)

Anyway, we can conclude that the benchmarks of a ClawHammer processor running at this “ridiculous” frequency were pretty impressive. Note that we mean impressive against the background of other 800MHz CPUs. I suggest taking a look at the table below with the results obtained in Quake3 Arena, which has actually always been a success for Pentium 4 processors (in fact, these are the only results available, so there is not so much to choose from):

CPU	Core Clock Frequency	Memory	fps
ClawHammer	800MHz	DDR333 2.5-3-3	183
Athlon MP	800MHz	DDR333 2.5-3-3	130
Athlon MP	800MHz	DDR333 2.5-2-2	133
Athlon MP	800MHz	DDR333 2.0-2-2	135
Athlon MP	1667MHz	DDR333 2.5-3-3	210
Pentium 4	800MHz	PC800-45	111
Pentium 4	1600MHz	PC800-45	182

Look: ClawHammer working at 800MHz shows here the same results as Pentium 4 (Willamette) working at 1.6GHz! Not bad, eh? Bearing in mind that the actual clock frequency of the first mass ClawHammer should be around 2GHz, we dare suppose that its rating (3400+) will be really close to the real state of things (that is to the performance of the “virtual” Pentium 4 with 512KB cache and 3.4GHz core clock). Although we should point out that Intel is not going to have any Pentium 4 (Northwood) processors working at this core frequency. Only 0.09micron Prescott due next summer (see this news story) will be able to reach this working frequency.

And I would like to point out once again that AMD 0.13micron processors are very tough in terms of core frequency increase. You will probably agree that the gap between the today’s 800MHz and the desired 2GHz is anyway too huge, even for a test sample. However, let’s hope for the better...