(Oh no, I feel another wall of text coming on...
)
Athlons do generate a lot of heat, but to be fair, the Willamette core P4s puts out even more than an Athlon. Intel has the market power to force heatsink and power supply manufacturers to add special connectors and retaining clips to support them. AMD couldn't have gotten away with that.
The Athlon XP (Palomino core) incorporated some design changes to the shape of the core and some other circuitry changes that result in lower heat output and total power consumption than the Athlon Tbirds did. At the same clockspeed, a Palomino core Athlon XP puts out 20% less heat than a Tbird would. As clockspeeds have rose the Athlon XP 2100+ now puts out nearly as much heat as the Athlon Thunderbird 1400 does.
The XP 2100+ will probably be the last Palomino core Athlon, newer Athlons will be using a new core, codename Thoroughbred. The only difference as compared to Palomino, is the switch to a .13 vs .18 micron process. In case you were wondering, this .13, .18, .25, .35 micron process statement refers to the minimum possible transistor length. (A MOS transistor looks basically like a rectangle, they have both length and width. As manufacturing technology improves it has been possible to make the individual transistors smaller and smaller.)
Shrinking the transistors has many benefits:
1. Lower power consumption
2. Smaller die size (you get more chips off the same size wafer, thus lower costs)
3. Lower voltage requirements. (That's why a bios flash or a new motherboard may be required.)
4. Higher speed (there's more at work here, but suffice it to say that shrinking the transistors generally allows higher speeds to be reached.)
5. You can fit more transistors on a given size die.
Throughbred was released a couple days ago as the Mobile Athlon XPs 1600 - 1800+ for notebooks. Desktop users should see them very soon as well. This Athlon XP core will probably launch at 2000 - 2200+ (1800 Mhz) speeds and scale up pretty fast to around 2 Ghz true clockspeed (XP 2500+). The early versions will probably overclock pretty well, definately better than a Palomino core XP 2100+. If they are out when you do buy your CPU and your board can support them, this would be a good way to go.
If you wait a little longer, if AMD sticks to its roadmap, the Barton core Athlon XP will be released. (This is supposed to happen in Q3 this year.) At the very end of the year, AMD is supposed to launch their brand new CPU design based around codename ClawHammer and SledgeHammer. ClawHammer core CPUs are probably going to have a variation of the Athlon name, and the Sledgehammer core CPUs were just officially named the AMD Opteron processor. The Opteron will definately not be within the budget for most of us when released. It can run regular PC applications, but is much much more powerful than any other x86 processor design I know of. Some of the early benchmarks I've seen would indicate a 25 - 35% performance improvement over the current Athlon XP when running at the same clockspeed. The Clawhammer CPUs (which will probably be called something like Athlon 2) are supposed to launch at around a 2 Ghz clockspeed and the ClawHammer version will probably rate as an XP 3400+ at that clockspeed. The Opteron will be used in multiprocessor systems ( 4 CPUs to be exact ), so don't expect to be able to afford that one.
There, now you all know what to expect for the rest of the year from AMD.
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LePaul, I have built computers for people. I mainly do it only for friends and family, when I have time. Recently I've been way too busy to even consider doing it though. I'm VERY VERY picky on what components I use in the systems I build, so it's not something I'd ever make any money doing. I always tinker and tweak the systems I built until they are as close to perfect as I can get them.
