by Anna Filatova
01/28/2002 | 05:31 PM
The notorious performance rating has now reached the mobile processors as well. AMD officially announced their Mobile Athlon 4 1500+, which is manufactured at the same Fab 18 in Dresden and costs $525 in 1,000-unit quantities.
To our great disappointment we should point out that AMD harmed the image of its performance rating greatly with the launching of this CPU. The matter is that the system bus frequency by Mobile Athlon 4 1500+ remained the same as by the previous models, i.e. 200MHz, while its desktop counterpart, Athlon XP 1500+, boasts 266MHz system bus. Their actual core clock frequencies also appeared completely unequal: the Mobile Athlon 4 1500+ works at the actual 1.3GHz, while Athlon XP 1500+ - at 1.33GHz. It appears that AMD uses two different formulas to obtain the performance rating for two different processor families. And to tell the truth, I consider this approach to be absolutely incorrect, because the performance of Athlon (Palomino) 1.3GHz with 200MHz system bus and that of Athlon (Palomino) 1.33GHz with 266MHz system bus (both marked with the same performance rating) is completely different.<%BANNER[article]%>
Of course, AMD started marking its mobile Athlon processors with the performance rating taking into account the upcoming launching of Intel Pentium 4-M CPUs. These processors working at 1.6GHz and 1.7GHz are due on March 4 (see this news story). After that AMD should probably launch Mobile Athlon 4 with 1600+ and 1700+ performance rating, which should help them reach a certain parity with Intel’s competitors. However, I suppose that this extremely easy (even shameless) manipulations with the formulas for rating calculations seems to me just cheating on the potential customers. And the customers will hardly ever forgive this kind of cheating. Frankly speaking, I have never expected AMD to act so thoughtlessly.