Bij GamePC is een uitgebreide review verschenen over de AMD Athlon XP 1,53GHz. Deze processor is gebaseerd op de Palomino core en heeft daarom een aantal leuke features aan boord. Nieuw zijn SSE ondersteuning, data prefetch, een lager stroomverbruik, een on-board temperatuur sensor en een organische packaging. Overclocken door middel van het verbinden van de L1 bruggen gaat dankzij de nieuwe packaging minder makkelijk, maar gewoon door middel van het verhogen van de FSB wisten de mannen van GamePC de 1,53GHz op 1725MHz te krijgen. Alles tezamen een goede processor, alleen jammer dat hij wordt vergezeld door slechte marketing:
If AMD cranks up the frequency of the Athlon XP up to 1.6 and 1.67 GHz, they could gain a truly large performance difference over the Pentium 4. When VIA's KT-266A and Nvidia's nForce gets out onto the market, the Athlon XP will gain an even bigger performance advantage. Not to mention, the Athlon XP costs about 1/3 of the price of the Pentium 4. The Athlon XP is truly an incredible processor.
The Athlon XP's reign at the top may not last for long, as Intel's "Northwood" Pentium 4 is right around the corner. At speeds of 2.2 GHz+, 512k on-die cache, a 0.13 micron architecture, and a rumored 533 MHz FSB, Intel has a very good chance of one-upping AMD once again. Until that day, the Athlon XP is the processor to get for any serious gaming rig.
AMD's engineering team has done an incredible job with the Athlon XP. On the other hand, AMD needs to reevaluate it's marketing strategies. Raising up the PR rating for the XP processors is certainly a bad sign in our books, as it will just add to the confusion about AMD's processors and what speed they're actually buying. We think the Athlon XP is a great processor in it's own right, and it doesn't need any lame marketing gimmicks to get people to buy it. Then again, when a company is having financial difficulties, they'll do some strange things to generate interest in their products.