INTEL MAY BE CRANKING up the Pentium 4, but AMD's not far behind with its new Athlon XP 3000+. AMD's bizarre naming scheme is all about performance, so although the 3000+ runs at 2.17GHz - exactly the same clock speed as its 2700+ sibling - it's got a trick or two up its sleeve to boost performance.
This is an enhanced processor based on AMD's new Barton core and it certainly proved in our tests that it's optimised for speedy results.
AMD's latest Athlon XP chip compares favourably with Intel's P4 and provides better performance despite having a much lower clock speed. The 0.13 micron-based 3000+ uses socket A motherboards and supports a 333MHz FSB (front side bus). This means information can be passed more quickly between the processor and the memory so bottlenecks are avoided. The 3000+ also houses a larger 512KB L2 cache, compared to 256KB on previous Athlon XPs. This improves performance mainly in sound, video and photo-editing applications where large files need to be manipulated quickly.
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