AMD Grabs the Crown: 600-MHz Athlon Bests the PIII

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Presario 5861 Street price: $2189 Compaq 800/345-1518 www.compaq.com

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Prosignia 330 Street price: $2499 Compaq 800/345-1518 www.compaq.com

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Quantex SM600 SE Street price: $2399 Quantex Microsystems 800/896-4898 www.quantex.com

Clinton vs. Starr. Trump vs. Trump. Gates vs. the feds. Now you can add AMD vs. Intel to the list of all-time battles royal. AMD has bet its future on the new Athlon processor. Best known by its code name, K7, this next-generation chip was designed with one clear aim: Unseat Intel as the speed king. And based on our tests of the first Athlon systems, AMD has done just that.

We tested two machines that are based on the AMD Athlon-600 chip--a preproduction Compaq Presario 5861, and a demonstration system built by AMD for our evaluation. Then we pitted both of these systems against Compaq and Quantex computers powered by Intel's new Pentium III-600 chip, which was rushed out the door in time to take on the Athlon.

Real Gains

The Athlon systems outperformed the PIII PCs in every part of the PC WorldBench 98 suite of business applications, averaging a 9 percent gain. In fact, the system AMD built bested Compaq's PIII-600 by 14 percent. In our graphics tests, the Athlon PCs flew through CAD and 3D modeling software, completing the AutoCAD test 21 percent faster than the Pentium IIIs. New chip logic in the Athlon speeds up the floating-point math used to display geometric shapes and high-resolution images, and the new floating-point unit noticeably accelerates existing apps. It does all this without requiring software to be rewritten, unlike AMD's 3DNow graphics instructions and Intel's Streaming SIMD instructions.

What a turnaround: Previous AMD chips paled beside Intel's graphics and floating-point muscle. AMD has also built in a 200-MHz system bus, which enables some performance gains now and will allow even more later.

System makers will use the Athlon in high-end home and small-office desktops configured much like PIII computers. AMD doesn't expect to crack the corporate PC market until next year since enterprise customers demand more time to evaluate products and insist that identical systems be available for a set amount of time. For now, graphics performance is the Athlon PCs' raison d'être. In particular, you'll want to consider the chip for modeling apps, Web site development, and Internet plug-ins. We didn't see big performance gains on today's 3D games, but next year's should be more demanding.

And here's the clincher: Athlon-600 systems should cost $100 to $200 less than comparably configured PIII-600 machines. Compaq's Athlon-600 Presario sells for just $2189. That makes AMD the current price/performance leader for consumer PCs.

What Kings Are Made Of

From name to basic design, the Athlon represents a dramatic departure for AMD. The company chose the name to suggest speed and athleticism and to distance the chip from downscale predecessors in the K6 family. The chip debuts at speeds of 500, 550, and 600 MHz, with features that Intel won't deliver until its major upgrade to the PIII, code-named Coppermine, arrives late this year. "The Pentium III is sort of an upgrade of the Pentium II," says Dean McCarron, principal at Mercury Research. "But the Pentium II architecture is on the order of three years old."

The Athlon's architecture is new. The CPU can handle up to six instructions per clock cycle, AMD says, whereas the Pentium-III can handle three instructions per clock cycle. (But sometimes the PIII can break instructions into small pieces and handle five such micro-operations at once.) The Athlon's 128KB level 1 cache, which processes some program instructions faster than regular RAM does, is four times larger than the PIII's level 1 cache. It should speed up jobs such as 3D rendering and some database work, McCarron says.

The Athlon's 200-MHz system bus is twice as fast as the PIII's. (AMD based it on the EV6 system bus developed by Digital Equipment that's used in Compaq servers and workstations with the Alpha microprocessor.) Today, the Athlon CPU enjoys a 200-MHz connection to the system chip set. But you won't realize the full potential of the bus until 200-MHz RAM becomes available, likely in the next six to nine months (see "Inside AMD's New 600-MHz Athlon Chip").

AMD claims another advantage: It has added 24 new instructions to its 3DNow technology. But savvy PC buyers will ask, "Where's the software?" Like Intel's Pentium III Streaming SIMD Extensions, AMD's 3DNow instructions can speed up graphics and other tasks in specially enhanced applications; 19 of the new 3DNow instructions aim to rev up speech and video encoding, Internet plug-ins, and Web streaming--also areas Intel tackled with SSE.

But like Intel, AMD must wait until software companies update applications to take advantage of its new instructions. We're taking a show-me attitude. No software using the 19 new instructions was ready for us to test, and AMD won't reveal the names or ship dates of software enhanced to capitalize on them. Most existing 3DNow-enhanced apps are games, with a few exceptions, such as IBM ViaVoice. Image editing and voice recognition apps are in the works, AMD says.

The First Big Test

To put the Athlon's new floating-point unit to the test, the PC World Test Center ran AutoCAD Users Group International's AUGI Gauge, a benchmark that times operations performed in Autodesk's AutoCAD 2000 computer-aided design software.

The Compaq Presario 5861 finished the test in 16.2 minutes, slightly ahead of the AMD demonstration system and roughly 3.5 minutes, or 21 percent, faster than the two PIII-600 machines. That's not chump change when you're talking benchmarks. It's a difference that translates into much faster completion of graphics-intensive work, such as Web design or modeling.

In our test with Caligari's TrueSpace 4.1 3D modeling program, the AMD demonstration PC showed an 18 percent advantage, enough to produce noticeably faster screen updates. (The Compaq Presario couldn't run this or the Rage Expendable test because its otherwise admirable 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 card doesn't support the test's 32-bit color mode.)

The two Athlon machines topped the PIII-600 systems by 8 percent in Futuremark's 3DMark, a series of benchmark tests that include game tasks using 3DNow and SSE extensions. Several parts of 3DMark, as well as our Rage Software Expendable game test, measure the number of video frames a CPU can display per second. The Athlons beat the PIIIs, by 5 to 16 percent. Since the frame rates of many games are already plenty fast, you may not see the difference. But an Athlon machine should offer investment protection as companies release more complex titles.

As for the less glamorous applications you use every day, you certainly don't need machines this fast for work with Word or Excel. But if you're going to buy an Athlon system because it's the fastest PC on the market, you will relish the results. The AMD demonstration system's PC WorldBench score of 281 is the fastest we've seen on a computer running Windows 98. The Athlon scores stand out even more when you put them in context: Pentium III-550 systems average a PC WorldBench score of 242, while PIII-500 systems--still mighty zippy--average 230.

Bottom Dollar, Top Value

Not surprisingly, all the configurations in this bunch are generous, including 19-inch monitors. If you want a loaded home PC, the Compaq Presario Athlon-600 and Quantex PIII-600 both qualify. However, the Compaq Athlon costs $210 less.

Take note of a few significant differences beyond the CPU. Compaq's Presario has a 13GB hard drive, and a 16MB graphics card based on the 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 chip set, while the Quantex has an 18GB hard drive, and a 32MB graphics card based on the NVidia RIVA TNT2 Ultra. Compaq's Athlon computer does not come with as many options as a typical Presario: Compaq will offer the system with a 17-inch monitor for $1999, or you can buy it with a fancy speaker and subwoofer set for just under $2500, but the core configuration is fixed.

The Presario 5861 is one of the first systems we've tested that has an 8X DVD-ROM drive. But don't throw a party just yet: The new drive's rotational speeds throw off data at roughly 11 MBps, faster than current CPUs and graphics cards can handle. "[The 8X drive] is really of most benefit to PC makers looking for a way to differentiate their systems," says Robert Katzive, an analyst at Disk/Trend.

Nitpicking aside, $2189 isn't much to pay for a loaded box containing a first-rate CPU. Consider this: When Pentium III-500 systems debuted last March, many of their prices were north of $2800. Long live competition.

Quantex's SM600 SE, still reasonably priced at $2399, comes with a 6X DVD-ROM drive and all the multimedia goodies you'd expect. Our $2499 Compaq small-business Prosignia 330 has an 18GB hard drive; it's also DMI 2.0 compliant and equipped with Compaq manageability software. Unlike the Athlon-based Presario 5861, this machine can be built to order. Add a 10/100 network card and a Zip 250 drive, and the Prosignia still checks in at a fair price of $2539.

Other system vendors planning to ship Athlon-600 computers soon include CyberMax, IBM, MidWest Micro, and Polywell. IBM says that it will add Athlon systems at all three introductory speeds to its Aptiva line in the third quarter of this year.

Your Next Move

The brief history of computing is littered with the remains of companies that thought superior technology could vanquish better-connected, better-marketed kings of industry. Since AMD is having financial troubles (see "Intel Is Winning the Battle of the Bucks"), you might wonder if it's best to wait to buy an Athlon desktop until the dust settles. The simple answer is no. As AMD is fond of pointing out, the world's top ten PC makers, with the exception of Dell, now use its chips, and you can expect the likes of Compaq and IBM to support PCs you buy from them no matter what happens to AMD.

That said, the upcoming months hold plenty of challenges for AMD. As it tries to pump up the Athlon's clock speed--a 650-MHz version is already in the works--Intel's war room is humming. Intel's 820 system chip set for PIII desktops, code-named Camino, will arrive soon, enabling a 133-MHz system bus. Speedy new memory will be ready when the chip set ships, delivering an immediate performance spike.

Furthermore, Intel will use a .18-micron process to make its Coppermine PIII chips, expected to debut late this year at 667 MHz. This process helps enable fast chip speeds and carves more chips from the same amount of silicon than today's .25-micron process can. AMD also plans to shift to a .18-micron process late this year in its Austin, Texas, fabrication plant, but the company will have it hands full since it's simultaneously opening a new $1.9 billion fabrication plant in Dresden, Germany.

On a larger level, Intel and AMD face a common problem--and so do consumers. While the chips keep getting faster, no "killer app" that demands more than 600 MHz is waiting in the wings. Truth be told, most people today are still not using software that screams for even 500 MHz worth of horsepower. The tremendous popularity of $1000 to $1500 systems is no accident: You can run Word, Excel, a Web browser, and basic games and graphics programs quite nicely on a Celeron or K6-2 machine. As we said when the Intel Pentium III-550 systems debuted, don't buy more computer than you need.

On the other hand, if you regularly buy systems with the top-of-line chip, the advantage of an Athlon-600 machine is clear. It's the new speed monarch, and what's more, it won't cost you a king's ransom.