AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.33GHz/1.30GHz

Final Words

Looking at the argument we have provided thus far, and taking into account the benchmarks in favor of the Athlon and the Pentium 4, we can make a few conclusions.

First, the Pentium III is an aging platform. It is perfectly suitable for the majority of the users out there, however once you begin to weigh down its 133MHz FSB with multiple concurrent transactions, the architecture will show its age. Does that mean all you 1GHz Pentium III users should go out and upgrade your machines today? Of course not, but do realize that if you're going to invest money into purchasing a new system or possibly an upgrade, you will most likely want to stay away from the Pentium III as an upgrade path today. A year ago it would've been perfectly acceptable, but simply put, there are better options out there.

The Pentium 4 isn't as bad of a performer as we originally thought. The Linpack and Sandra memory performance graphs we have been showing you all for so long have surfaced in a few real world tests where the Pentium 4's architecture combined with its incredible memory bandwidth end up performing quite well. The unfortunate problem with the Pentium 4 is that it is too expensive and it doesn't offer enough of a performance boost in the majority of today's applications to be worth it. Just as we are waiting for AMD to release Palomino, Intel's Northwood Pentium 4 core may be worth the wait as well. At 0.13-micron, the Northwood core should help to lower prices on the processors and by then the processor will also be using its new Socket-478 interface, so we will revisit the idea of going down the Pentium 4 route at that time. For now, it still doesn't make much sense to upgrade to the Pentium 4. You're better off getting a cheap solution in the interim (possibly a Duron) and making the decision once Palomino and Northwood are out.

Finally, we get to the Athlon, the topic of this review of course. Now at 1.33GHz, the Athlon is running faster than ever. However the most attractive point about the Athlon outside of its performance, is its price to performance ratio. The benefit of the 1.33GHz Athlon right now is that it will help drive the prices of the rest of the Athlon line down even further. If you already hadn't noticed, the 1GHz Athlon we used in this comparison performed quite well, and is currently very affordably priced.

AMD has also been improving yields on their Athlons, we were recently testing an OEM 1.1GHz Athlon that would work perfectly fine at 1.33GHz without even increasing its core voltage. The 1.33GHz part we used for these tests, in spite of its incredible heat dissipation, was able to hit just under 1.5GHz without too much effort. If AMD can get the current Thunderbird core to carry them to 1.5GHz and beyond, they might just save Palomino for a rainy day and hope to hit with something much harder than just a cooler running core.