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CLASH OF SILICON GIANTS: Athlon 550 vs. Pentium III 550
When Advanced Micro Devices released its new processor, dubbed as the Athlon, it sent tremors in the microprocessor industry long used to having chip giant Intel as the champion in performance. With Athlon, AMD not only managed to match Intel, it managed to out slug Intel and came up with a knockout of performance. Reminds me of Rocky Balboa. I loved him because although he would take a beating from his foe, Rocky refuses to quit. Whenever knocked down, he refuses to stay down. He would take the worst beating and come back for more. Yet, in the later rounds, he would come up smoking and end up standing alone on the ring, proud and victorious. And this is not very far from what AMD has managed with the Athlon. Initially there were many skeptics about claims that Athlon outperforms the best Intel has to offer. And with good reason. The history of the rivalry of the two microprocessor manufacturer tells a saga—that of AMD being a perennial loser, second best to Intel. But with the Athlon, the tables are turned. Or so most of the Athlon reviews have said. I’d like to see for myself if the stories are indeed true. The Athlon phenomenon is specially interesting in the light of the situation here in the Philippines where Intel had been lording it over all other processors. It is only with the introduction of the K6-2 that AMD had begun to be recognized as an alternative processor. Still, AMD mindshare among Filipino computer consumers is relatively low. It should be pointed out that the pricing of AMD processors is one of the major factors in keeping the prices of processor affordable to the consuming public and I believe the success of a viable competition would be in the best interest of everybody. For this reason, I had been itching to get my hands on an Athlon system for a long time. I wanted, to the best of my limited ability to give Filipino computer consumers and enthusiasts information on this new "bright kid" from AMD. Fortunately, the gods of the silicon circuits have probably smiled on me and my wish had come true. A good friend allowed me to conduct benchmarks on a similarly configured Athlon 550 and Pentium III 550 systems. But there’s a catch, I have to do my thing in only one day, before the systems are shipped out from here in the Philippines. In reality, I only had a few hours to do my testing so I only managed to run a minimum number of benchmarks. Yet despite the tight deadline, I believe a good idea of the strength of Athlon can already be seen. Test Configurations Here are the common hardware configurations we used for the test: 128 MB PC 100 SDRAM’s 6.4 GB Quantum CE harddisk Toshiba DVD-ROM Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card Creative SB Live soundcard ASUS P2B motherboard (for Pentium III 550), Fester AMD reference motherboard (for Athlon 550). Software Microsoft Windows 98 4.10.2222 A Direct X 7.0 Okay, so we're set. Let's find out how the two processors measure up to each other in the first round. |
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