Bij Ace's Hardware is nu ook een review te vinden van de nieuwe AMD Athlon, codenaam Thunderbird. Ace's Hardware is wat milder voor de nieuwe telg uit de AMD-familie dan de meesten. Er wordt redelijk positief gesproken over de nieuwe processor, ondanks dat de benchmarks voor velen een beetje tegenvielen.
However, unless you stare at cache latency graphs all day long, as we admittedly did for the first few days, there is a real performance benefit associated with Thunderbird and its new cache. Our benchmarks indicate a substantial performance improvement over 1/3 and even 2/5-speed Athlon Classics. As we explained earlier, the performance gap between Thunderbird and K75 will widen as clock speeds increase...the result is that Thunderbird's performance will scale in a much more linear fashion compared to the older Athlons.
There are other considerations as well, such as economic factors. Despite the increase in die-area, AMD no longer has to provide packaging and external SRAMs for Athlon MPUs. Even beyond cost, there is more benefit. For example, AMD's upcoming DDR SDRAM chipset, the AMD-760, should provide significant improvements in system performance and feature-set over the current KX133/KT133 variety. Also, 760MP will finally allow dual-processor Athlon systems to be built.
All in all, I feel that the performance looks very good despite our perhaps exaggerated expectations. Even if it is not enough for you personally, there's always multiprocessor Thunderbird systems as well as Mustang just a few months on down the road.