Review: AMD Thunderbird 1.33GHz (133MHz FSB) (Page 8/9)

Posted: February 22, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Analysis and Conclusion

AMD has delivered another serious blow at Intel and this is another sign at AMD’s growth. The 1.33GHz Thunderbird is the best processor available right now. The other day I read a reader’s comment post on our front page that said the following:

”I love these tests and the whole idiocy that goes along with them. The P4 like its predecessors is using new technology on its chips and the majority of the software has yet to support it. AMD went through the same growing pains as the P4 with 3dnow. Intel is just beginning to get support for its SSE2 instruction set. Keeping this all in mind, websites are still compelled to review the chip on older non-supporting software.

Of course AMD will outperform Intel on the current tests in some areas. It’s based on older (supported) technology and current software. Not to mention the P4 is newer than the T-bird. Consequently there still motherboard manufactures for the P4 that are still ironing out the bugs with their designs. Which also affects benchmarks and compatibility issues.

In a perfect scenario I want to see both chips tested with all of there features utilized. Until then, benchmarks don’t carry much weight in my book. Benchmarks still entertaining to see which website struggles to come out with one first. It’s also fun to see the incredible variety in opinion and results in each benchmark from various websites and magazines.

What makes allot of focuses on benchmarks bad is that it takes away from the other attributes of a CPU that get overlooked. Such as, chip durability and heat. These are huge factors if you want to build your own system.

Frailty of AMD’s chips is one of my biggest pet peeves. I see too many people on message boards building their first PCs running into problems due to this flaw in chip design. These same people have been dazzled by the benchmark numbers and blindly overlook other aspects such as this and subsequently run into problems later.

For the record I do own a P4 1.5 GHz and seriously considered the AMD competition until I looked beyond the benchmarks and focused on the whole picture.

Steve B.”

Benchmarks perfectly and fairly show competition. When the Athlon came out, it ripped through every application and game that was thrown at it without waiting for optimizations. Therefore, saying that one must wait until Pentium 4 optimized software comes out holds no grounds. The fact that the Pentium 3 still beats the Pentium 4 on some benchmarks is a sign that there are consequences with the long pipelines in the Pentium 4.

AMD went through growing pains with 3DNow like Intel with MMX, not SSE and SSE2. SSEx is quickly being adopted everywhere in applications and games much more than 3DNow is and yet we still see the Thunderbird out ranking the Pentium 4.

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