Johan De Gelas van Ace's Hardware heeft een artikel gepost waarin hij een antwoord probeert te vinden op de vraag of de Athlon met recht een zevende generatie CPU genoemd mag worden:
It is funny, the Athlon faces the same accusations as the P6 faced when it emerged. When Intel introduced the PII* (and Pentium pro), the PII outperformed the 5th generation Pentium MMX only by a small margin. Many people started to ask themselves "is that all a six generation CPU can do ?".What they forgot was that the PMMX was 5th generation core with a few 6th generation tricks. The branch prediction of the P55 (Pentium MMX) was much better than what the original 5th generation P54 (plain vanilla Pentium) featured, and the P55's L1-cache was twice as big as the P54's. In other words, it is only natural that the first incarnation of a new generation doesn't perform that much faster than an older but well know, tweaked and tuned architecture. A new core however has a higher potential: tweaks and better caches can bring the performance far above the previous generation. A Pentium MMX is quite a bit slower than a Coppermine, clock for clock.
De conclusie (ja, Athlon is zevende generatie) en argumentatie lees je hier.
