Don't Buy Now Buy Later (AMD Athlon 4 (Palomino))

Member Name: Meshek

Product:	AMD Athlon 4 (Palomino)
Date:	13/01/02 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good Processor

Disadvantages: Better things just round the corner.

Amd rose from almost complete obscurity a few years ago when they decided to start developing and making processors. Before this they made specialised chips for network cards and the like.

At the start there processors were regarded as the poor mans choice behind intel. They soon began to catch up and even beat Intel to 1GHz. Recently however they were beaten to 2GHz by intel. The situation as it now stands is the Athlon XP 2000+ (1566MHz) versus the new northwood pentium 4's running at 2200MHz. This would seem to show that Intel processors are much faster it doesn't and hence AMD's policy of not labeling the processors in MHz i.e. 2000+. As it turns out the athlon xp 2000+ is slower but only by arround 2 - 3%. This came as a surprise to many people that the gap is so small as AMD is still using the .18 Micron printing as opposed to Intel just switching over to .13. However this is only true if the intel is using the more expensive rambus ram if it is using the DDR ram the amd beats the intel hands down.

And this is where my point lies of not buying a processor now. In little under a month from now (12,1,02) the new AMD 'thourghbreed' processors are coming out (amd's .13 Micron chips). And so if you are aiming to own the fastest processor possible it will be worth waiting till then as these are likely to be a clear 10 - 20% faster than current processors and if you are aiming for a bargin the current AMD XP's price will crash after the new thourghbreed processors are released.

If you are desperate to buy a processor right now buy this one as opposed to the intel as not only is the processor cheaper the ram is as well. And despite the cheaper price the AMD is almost the same speed. However if you can bear to wait a month these processors will be cheap and the new even faster processors will have come out.

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