Anand heeft een review gepost van de Athlon 700, waarvan de release vandaag plaats zal vinden. In feite gaat het hier natuurlijk gewoon om een hoger geklokt Athlon modelletje, dus de performance is vrij voorspelbaar. Wel interessant zijn de benchmarks van Anand, daar zitten ook de nieuwe Pentium III B CPU's tussen en die blijken dankzij hun busspeed van 133MHz in sommige gevallen bijna net zo snel te zijn als een vergelijkbaar geklokte Athlon:
What did we expect from the Athlon 700? Everything we got from the Athlon 700. The CPU is just a faster Athlon, which is definitely good for AMD for the time being, but what will it do in the long term?Nothing much if Intel releases a drastically different architecture with their upcoming Coppermine CPU that completely blows the Athlon away. But chances are that this won't be the case, and the Coppermine won't be anything more than the same Pentium III core that we're used to with 256KB on-die L2 cache running at clock speed.
What the Athlon 700 does is it puts another step between Intel's fastest and AMD's fastest which is very good for the company. But what it doesn't do is secure the performance title for AMD throughout the rest of the year and on into 2000. Intel's Pentium III B doesn't do much with the i820 and RDRAM under Windows 98. But under NT, and especially under high bandwidth applications such as 3D Studio MAX where a lot of data is being manipulated, the 133MHz FSB + RDRAM makes for a very competitive combo. The Coppermine may push that competitive barrier even further, and may begin to threaten AMD's territory there.
Lees het complete verhaaltje hier.
