Zardon

Aesthetically, the Barton based Athlon XP looks very much like a Thoroughbred XP. The die is slightly longer than the Thoroughbred, but this is because of the extra transistors required to allow AMD to double the size of the L2 cache from 256K to 512K.

The increase in performance that this additional cache presents is enough for AMD to justify tweaking it's PR (Pentium Rating) by a few MHz. For example, a 333 MHz front side bus XP2500+ with the Thoroughbred core runs at 2000 MHz. A Barton based 2500+ runs at "only" 1833 MHz.

This bump up in the PR numbers is another way for AMD to hit home the idea that MHz isn't everything. The tweaking of the Athlon XP's Pentium Rating has been done once before and not too long ago when AMD introduced the 333 MHz front side bus Athlon XP. A Thoroughbred based Athlon running at 2000 MHz with a 266 MHz front side bus is only considered a 2400+, instead of 2500+.

Despite AMD’s adjustment of the Pentium Rating for the Barton, in some benchmarks the Barton does not even beat out a 266 MHz FSB Thoroughbred 2400+. What I found is that benchmarks where clock speed typically plays the greatest part of pulling off the big numbers still beat out my 2500+.

For example, SiSoft Sandra’s CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia Benchmarks were better with the aforementioned 2400+ running at 2000 MHz, then the Barton 2500+ running at 1833 MHz. The extra cache did help Barton pull off better scores than a 2400+ in SiSoft’s Memory Bandwidth Benchmark, however. In PCMark, CPU scores were low for the Barton, but Memory scores were high. And in a “real life” benchmark, like Novalogic’s Comanche 4 Demo, the Barton pulled off both higher FPS and higher Tris per second.

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WyreTheWolf

WOW! That is really amazing... however, I am kind of wondering if this sweet little chip will work with my MSI KT3 Ultra2... MSI, has decided to put the MSI KT3 Ultra, and Ultra2 into the archive...