Posted: June 6th, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Analysis and Conclusion

AMD is simply shooting the gun wildly lately. It hasn’t stop to take a break and is just continuing to release product after product. Not only is today the release of the 1.4GHz Athlon, today is also the release of the 950MHz Duron processor which I’ll take a look later.

What exactly have we gained with the 1.4GHz Athlon? We haven’t gained much. It’s undeniable that the performance has increased, but not enough to warrant extreme excitement over. What this new revision really shows is how scalable the Athlon architecture is. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a 1.5GHz by the end of the summer.

There are no new architecture enhancements in the 1.4GHz Athlon. Instead, all new features will be available in the Athlon 4 MP and Athlon 4 processors. Based on the Palomino core, the Athlon 4 can give you more of a performance boost than the current Thunderbird core can. We’ll also be looking forward to AMD’s Morgan core due out in a few months.

If you’re a die-hard gamer looking for extreme bang for your buck, it might be better to go with a 1.33GHz AXIA core chip than the 1.4GHz chip. However, since prices for AMD chips are at an all time low, you might as well hit it off with the 1.4GHz.

Another interesting solution you can try to go for is a dual TBird Athlon setup. If price is no object, then feel free to splurge for a Tyan Thunder K7 760MP board and go wild with dual 1.4GHz Athlon processors. For most of you, I recommend waiting on the dual processor scene for a few weeks until AMD releases its consumer level dual processor solution. With the new chipset, you’ll have all the cool features of the 760MP along with some new and improved ones. There are actually some very small and minor issues with the 760MP that will be ironed out with the next version.

For now, the new 1.4GHz Athlon reigns supreme as the best single processor solution for your next system or upgrade.

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