Thunderbird speeds in the future

[OpJ]

Intel's chip, Pentium 4 is now available at 1.7Ghz, which in theory means, with good cooling an overclocked P4 running at 2Ghz. (very hard i imagine).

Right now, the highest speed chips that are available from AMD with 266Mhz FSB are 1.33Ghz. With the lower speed, even an overclocked AMD chip would have to work hard to hit the 2000mhz mark.

Do AMD have any intentions of releasing higher speed CPU's soon? People have overclocked their Athlon's to 500mhz over the original speed, so a 1.5Ghz release from AMD would truly be the chip to have.

Any insights/comments welcomed
Owen

[Oni]

The Palomino (Athlon 4) will probably hit at least as high as a mid-level P4 in speed, once they are officially released, that is.

[mrpcman]

But the p4's are slow.

[Phil]

don't be too fooled by the high advertised clock speeds of the p4, for a start they only run the fpu and sse2 units at 1/2 clock speed, so at 2ghz you will only just be getting a 1ghz fpu unit (and it's a pretty crap fpu unit) also it now seems that the clock throttling issue is more of an issue than it was thought, Hardware-unlimited (http://www.hardware-unlimited.com/reviews/athlon133ddr/index5.shtml) recentally spotted some inconsistant results when comparing a p4 to a 1.33ghz tbird in that results would suddenly go about 20% slower and not return to full speed without restarting quake 3 or sometimes the entire computer which would suggest that the inbetween clock throttles handled in software by the bios were taking place (the 50% one is in hardware) so overclocking to 2ghz may sound great but it could mean a computer 50% slower if it kicks the clock throttle in which with the extra temp is a very possible reality, so if you combine the clock throttle with the 1/2 speed fpu and sse2 unit then at 2ghz you may only be getting an fpu running at 500-800mhz, obviously the memory bandwidth and a geforce gpu can hide this in games but I still have reservations about the P4

[jeff_harrison_344]

Slight translation of what Phil said:

Intel sux. :)

[Megahurtz]

I don't have it on any good authority, but Jerry Sanders did say last week, that the launch of a 1.4Ghz 'T-Bird' was imminent. I suspect that more details will emerge tomorrow. He also said that the 1.4Ghz launch was to be followed by a 1.5Ghz part, and then higher clockspeeds.

I do not know if the higher clockspeed Athlons, >1.4Ghz will be strictly Palominos..but this appears likely..if any of the latest roadmaps are to be believed.

T

[Phil]

jeff_harrison_344 (May 13, 2001 06:42 p.m.):
Slight translation of what Phil said:

Intel sux. :)

"I didn't think it was possible but this both sucks and blows"