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It wasn't more than a couple of months ago that Advanced Micro Devices wowed us with its new 600MHz processor. With the Athlon, AMD was finally able to establish itself as the performance leader, with the chip surpassing the Pentium III in almost every way.
But in the fight for the number one spot, you've got to remain faster and better than the competition or you'll fall off the ladder. As a long-time underdog in the CPU wars, AMD understands this, and the next Athlon chip is ready to go. It's the Athlon 700 MHz - you heard right: 700 MHz--and it's the fastest thing we've seen yet.
Spec me
The chip is identical to the 600Mhz in almost every way. It's still built with the 0.25-micron process. It still has 22 million transistors. The Level 1 and Level 2 caches are unchanged. And it's still riding in an AMD reference motherboard. (Third-party board makers aren't quite ready yet, but we understand they're close to releasing their own boards.)
Its key distinguishing characteristic is the extra 100 MHz - and it's a good thing.
AMD sent us a full test system. Along with the reference board and 700MHz chip, it came with 128MB PC100 RAM, a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT2 video card, a Sound Blaster Live! sound card, a Western Digital Expert 41800 hard drive, a Toshiba 6X DVD (SD-M1212) player, and a Linksys HPN100 Home Ethernet card.
Test me
We tested the Athlon 700Mhz with the same tests we threw at the 600Mhz: Futuremark's 3Dmark 99MAX, Rage's Expendable demo V1.0, and id Software's Quake III Q3Test V1.05. It also handled the games we threw at it (including the Descent Freespace II and Need for Speed: High Stakes) with no apparent problems.
The 700MHz outshone the 600MHz in most categories. For instance, the Synthetic CPU 3D Speed test (a CPU-taxing gauge) in 3Dmark 99MAX, for the 600MHz measured 12,201 (3Dmarks) compared to the 700MHz's 13,821 (and it blew away the PIII 500, which only ranked a score of 7684).
But the margin was not that wide. We saw the 600MHz post a 245.4 FPS in the 4MB Texture Rendering category and the 700Mhz came in at 251 FPS. Likewise, while the 600MHz showed a score of 135.4 FPS in the Bump Mapping Embos 3-pass test, the 700MHz beat it by only a couple of numbers, coming in at 139.1. With the gaming FPS test, the 700MHz beat out the 600MHz in 640 x 480 and 1,024 x 768 resolutions in the Quake 3 Test. Strangely, however, in two of the three tests at 800 x 600, it posted lower frame rates than the 600 MHz.
The price for speed
It definitely edges out the 600MHz, if only by small margins. So how much are you willing to spend for that speed? Prices for single chips weren't available at press time but an AMD representative tells us that a full Athlon-based system should go for $2,500--not too shabby for a machine with this performance. (If you're buying them in bulk, the chip will go for $850 each in packs of a thousand.)
Then you can brag to your friends, "Yeah, that's my 700Mhz computer over there"
AMD just raised the stakes.-- Danny W. Lam / GamePro
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