AMD heeft vandaag de NDA van de 1,1GHz Athlon laten vallen en uiteraard kon Tommie niet achterblijven met zijn eigen 1,1GHz Tbird review. Tom's benchmarks laten zien dat de 1,1GHz Thunderbird in vrijwel alle tests sneller is dan de 1GHz Pentium III en dat voor een 25% lagere prijs:
There you have it. AMD has simply taken the next step and brought the Thunderbird core to the next speed grade. It is good to see that this did not require any strange tweaks to the core or to the platform. Basically, the 1.1 GHz Athlon is 'just another Athlon' really. This can only be a good thing compared to Intel's 1.13 GHz Pentium III, which turned out a rather troublesome solution. It is rather obvious that the Thunderbird core offers a lot more clock speed headroom than Intel's Coppermine-core. However, while Coppermine will soon be replaced by 'Willamette' or 'Pentium 4', Athlon will have to stick around a bit longer. AMD will probably be forced to put an even faster Thunderbird up against Intel's future Pentium 4, unless 'Mustang' should indeed be ready very soon.
The same that I said in the review of Intel's Pentium III at 1.13 GHz is obviously valid for AMD's new super-processor as well. Make sure you've got software that justifies the expense!!! I wouldn't know a lot of people that really need this processor right now. However, if you want to go for a top-notch x86-CPU, I'd rather go for AMD's offering. The reason is pretty simple. First of all it seems rather obvious that the Athlon/Thunderbird 1.1 GHz is the more reliable and more flexible solution of the two. It also offers excellent performance and it comes for a much more attractive price than Intel's counterpart.
Een vergelijking met de 1,13GHz PIII was helaas niet mogelijk omdat het exemplaar van Tom te labiel functioneerde om de benchmarks zonder crash te overleven. De 1,1GHz Athlon deed 't prima en draaide ook op 1,15GHz redelijk stabiel. Met uitzondering van de Linux kernel compilation test werden alle benchmarks op deze kloksnelheid met succes voltooid worden.