Conclusion

Conclusion

AMD is the new lord of the silicon ring! With the Athlon, Intel has found itself dethroned as the performance king. In all the tests, Athlon has outperformed a Pentium III at the same MHz rating. After suffering all the beatings it has received from the erstwhile champion, AMD has stood up, traded blows, and emerged as the winner.

But all these performance would be nothing if Athlon would not get enough support for motherboard manufacturers so that it can become a viable platform for computer users.

As it stands now, there are only four Athlon motherboards available for the Filipino consumers: FIC SD-11, Freetech P7F200A, MSI M-6167, and ASUS K7M. This is not saying there are enough volume of these motherboards to supply the Filipino consumers who may want to own an Athlon system.

It is not like anybody here in the Philippines could just walk into a computer shop and get his Athlon system. I believe the difficulty of finding a motherboard for the Athlon is not a situation peculiar here.

Not a few reports came out that Intel had been pressuring motherboard manufacturers to stay away from producing Athlon mobo, with the hint that supply of the BX chipset might suddenly become scarce for them. And the reports seems to have some basis. Why is it, as Tom Pabst of Tomshardware has pointed out, that only FIC and MSI have the balls to advertise their Athlon mobos in their company websites. All others tend to downplay their support for the Athlon.

I join those who hopes that motherboard manufacturers would be able to resist the pressure and give us consumers alternatives when choosing our computer systems.

Make no mistake about it, Athlon is a very good processor. If you have money to burn and is planning to buy a computer system, an Athlon-based system is a wise buy. ;-)

Epilogue: The Empire Strikes Back?

Reawakened by the painful realization of its sudden loss of the speed crown, Intel dipped down into its bags of tricks and the Pentium III Copermine or Pentium III E was introduced, purportedly its answer to the Athlon.

Benchmarks in several websites show that with the improvement in the P6 core and modifications in its L2 cache, the Coppermine can math the performance of the Athlon, at least in some areas, and even surpass AMD’s bet in cranking up framerates in newer games like the Quake3 Arena. Still, the Coppermine can’t touch Athlon in brute fpu power.

But Intel will not rest until it it can take back at least the MHz speed record and announced its Pentium III Coppermine at 733 MHz. Despite the announcement, the Register has reported that there seems to be very few 733 Coppermine around that even big OEM’s are finding it hard to get it.

But the fight is just beginning, AMD is reportedly ready to unleash its 750MHz Athlons, holding back its punch until the right moment. The second round in this fight should very exciting, and whoever emerges as the champion, it is in the end the consumer who will benefit from it.

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