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

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

Analysis and Conclusion (cont.)

Concluding that the Thunderbird beats the Pentium 4 because it’s based on “older (supported) technology” is totally incorrect. Remember, the Athlon architecture is a 7th generation architecture and so is the Pentium 4’s. If it took Intel over a year to catch up in architecture generation then shouldn’t Intel be better from learning and observing AMD? I would think so. The Pentium 4 isn’t a radically new. Remember back when Intel introduced the Pentium Pro with poor 16bit performance and later released the Pentium 2 with the same core but enhanced 16bit performance? They should have learned to do the same but that’s not the point. The real problem is the long pipelines within the Pentium 4. A branch mis-prediction near the end of the 20+ stage pipelines results in starting at the beginning. That’s a serious penalty and it’s one of the reasons why Intel clocks the arithmetic units much higher than the rest of the CPU core.

Motherboard designs are a side issue. The first time the Athlon came out with its initial motherboard support, it still beat the pants off of anything else available. Also, talking about the fragile condition of Socket A processors, the simple reply to that one is, put on your heatsink -- that’s been certified by AMD -- properly and carefully.

I’m not going to go into detail about the Pentium 4 as my article on the Pentium 4 architecture can be read here. What I’m going to finish off with though, is the “whole picture”.

The big picture is what performance you get for what you pay for. If Steve says he looks at the big picture than he wouldn’t have purchased the Pentium 4 as early as he did. Why? He’s still waiting for optimized software, software that won’t be optimized for the Pentium 4 anytime soon so why did he purchase a Pentium 4 now? The better choice would have been a Thunderbird. From benchmarks, a Thunderbird would have offered Steve much better real world performance in productivity apps as well as the majority of games available. Also, Duron and Thunderbird processors overclock very easily which would have given Steve even more value for his money.

Anyway, back to the 1.33GHz Thunderbird.

From what we’ve seen, it offers sizable gains above the 1.2GHz but not by a serious margin. Considering that FSB overclocking gives good performance increases, going with a cheaper 1.2GHz and pushing it higher would yield better performance than a stock 1.33GHz system.

One of the factors to consider before you run out and purchase a 1.33GHz or 1.2GHz Thunderbird is the coming of Palomino. To sum it up, the Palomino core will reduce power consumption and reduce heat dissipation as well as offer more speed increases. AMD will also begin to migrate all of its processors onto the 133MHz FSB and higher in the near future. All things considered, the 1.33GHz Thunderbird a great chip and it’s still cheaper than the fastest Pentium 4.

If you have to get the best, the 1.33GHz is for you. But if you want to make a smart purchase, go for a 1.2GHz Thunderbird and overclock it. Pairing a 1.2GHz/133 with a VIA KT133A based board should give you a lot of growing room as well as overclocking finesse.

First Page