Athlon 3200+, the beginning of the end

[Julio Franco]

AMD has unveiled what may be the latest desktop Athlon processor, the 3200+ operates at 2.2GHz and receives the same 'Barton' treatment like the previous 3000+ chip for a final front side bus speed of 400MHz.

It's unfortunate though AMD decided to bump up actual clock speeds so little (only 30MHz faster than its predecessor) and while performance looks good overall it does have a hard time competing with Intel's latest Pentium 4 running at 3GHz on a 800MHz FSB, as a matter of fact, the 3200+ PR rating wouldn't seem to make justice to the P4.

Reviews can be read at: AMDMB, Tech-Report, Firingsquad, HotHardware.

Both VIA and NVIDIA will release new chipsets that will bring full support to the 3200+, KT600 and nForce2 Ultra 400, respectively.
AMD is expected to close the book for the Athlon in terms of high-end offerings after this release though, the company will concentrate on the Athlon 64 that is scheduled to debut in September, then leave the good old Athlon as a lower-end offering as long as it's needed.

 

[Unregistered]

Speaking about mhz increases, how come AMD doesnt actually make a 3.0 Ghz processor? And rate it at like 4000+?

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Either

1) Their technology can't handle that high frequencies

or

2) They want to milk the customers by adding just a little speed to their CPUs at a time.

 

[DigitAlex]

2) seems unlikely

 

[Didou]

I think the Athlon architecture is reaching the end of its possibilities as was the P3 around 1.3/1.4GHZ.

The only way to get higher speeds would be to use SOI or 0.09 nano technology which is highly unlikely for anything other then the Hammer generation of CPUs.

 

[acidosmosis]

Uh.. come on guys use some common sense here. I dont think I need to waste my time explaining to you the whole processor world.