AMD's Barton core arrives, targets Pentium 4

See correction below

The additional cache placed on the die of AMD's (Advanced Micro Devices) new Barton core for its Athlon XP processors vaults the Athlon XP 3000+ ahead of rival Intel's highest-performing processor, AMD said Monday.

The AMD Athlon XP 3000+, released Monday, now features 640K bytes of on-die cache, up from 384KB on the older Thoroughbred core, said John Crank, senior brand manager for the Athlon product line. Otherwise, the processor is identical to older AthlonXPs with a 333MHz front-side bus, Crank said.

In a presentation, AMD cited benchmarks that showed the 3000+ processor provided a higher level of performance than Intel's 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processor, which features a technology known as hyperthreading. Those benchmarks also showed that Intel's hyperthreading technology actually caused a 4 percent decrease in performance compared to a 3.06GHz processor with hyperthreading turned off. Hyperthreading allows an operating system or application to believe a system has a second processor in addition to the actual chip, causing it to send more instructions to the processor.

Naturally, Intel defended its technology. "The Pentium 4 processor gives up to a 25 percent performance improvement in multithreaded application scenarios," said George Alfs, an Intel spokesman.

"When a multiprocessor kernel is loaded, there can be a 1 to 2 percent overhead [drag on performance], but that is more than made up for in a more responsive system when multitasking and running multithreaded applications," he said.

Many users consult benchmarks to compare processor performance, but a benchmark only reflects the performance of that processor for the particular application on which it was tested. AMD used several 3D gaming benchmarks, including Unreal Tournament and QuakeIII, as well as Sysmark 2001, an office productivity and digital media benchmark developed by the Business Application Performance (BAPCo).

Illustrating the delicate nature of benchmarking results, AMD itself attacked the Sysmark 2002 benchmark last year, charging it was altered to favor Intel's Pentium 4 processors. Since making those allegations, AMD has joined BAPCo, but at the time Sysmark 2002 was developed, Intel was the only desktop processor vendor involved in that standards-setting process.

AMD is expected to post the benchmarking results and the specifications of the systems used to obtain the results on its Web site Monday.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company will extend the Barton core to its previously announced Athlon XP 2800+ processor. When the 2800+ was launched, it was only made available in a limited number of specialized gaming systems, and AMD will not manufacture any more of those 2800+ processors with the Thoroughbred core, Crank said.