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It is in the floating point performance where previous AMD processors have shown weakness. Floating point, being important to gaming performance—particularly in 3D games—many gamers have shied away from AMD-based systems. Yes, AMD has included in the K6-2 the innovative 3Dnow! Instructions, that make K6-2 dish out respectable gaming performance on applications optimized for it. Yet, the initial lack of widespread support for 3Dnow! of many popular games drove gamers to stick to Intel’s Celeron, a processor that have all the floating point punch of a Pentium II cpu but at a cost competitive with AMD K6-2’s.

With the Athlon, AMD decided to face the floating point issue once and for all. The K7, initial name for Athlon, was designed with a 3-stage pipelined floating point, intended to boost significantly its strength in fpu-intensive applications.

The test results show that Athlon has enough fpu strength to bludgeon the competition.

 Synthetic Benchmark

I also ran Futuremark’s 3DMark99 to find out how the Athlon would perform in a synthetic benchmark. For the Athlon 3Dnow! optimization was enabled while SSE optimization was also enabled for the Pentium III.

Here is the result:

Here the result is pretty much the same. Intel’s Pentium III has succumbed to the greater ability of AMD’s Athlon.

Ok, ok, the Athlon rocks. But can all this power translate to a better gaming experience?

                                                                                  Gaming Performance ......