cpu-museum.de

[Grampa]

Dear Visitors,
Just returning from my holidays in France I send you the best wishes for the new year, hoping that you had a far better start into the new year than me. This time I'll show you the processors that I'm currently using for everyday's work:

AMD Duron 600MHz
I got this one some months ago. Originally, I got this CPU for my girl friend's computer in 2000, but as time goes by, this one's got replaced by a Duron-800 (which I had two of) so this chip found its way into my museum. In essence, the Duron was a stripped-down Socket-A Athlon Thunderbird with only 1/4 the L2-cache size, available in speed ranges from 600MHz up to 950MHz (later ones had different cores) so this one was the slowest Duron available. Introduced in late summer of 2000 this one was a very tempting chip, offering speed that was clearly superior to the Celeron and was only little slower than Intel's and AMD's equally-clocked flagships, the P-III and Athlon. Interestingly at first sight, with prices below 100$ this chip looked like a bargain, but if you looked closer, you had to notice that unlike Intel's Socket-370/Slot-1 platform, Socket-A mainboards were quite new and still very expensive so that in the end it didn't make much difference. From today's perspective this chip can be considered outdated, but most Socket-A boards available today still work fine with this chip. Together with 1.5GB RAM this chip serves well in my Linux based VNC Terminal Server which provides file services and internet access as well. My workhorse, so to say.


AMD Duron 1600MHz (Applebred)
This Duron was quite a surprise when it arrived only some months ago as nobody believed that looking at current lower clocked Athlon's prices a low-cost chip would make sense. However, in July 2003 AMD released these Duron-Applebred or Appalbred (derrived from the names Appaloosa and Thoroughbred) in 1.4GHz, 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz variants which were relabeled Athlons with defective cache parts that were disabled. The interesting thing about this chip is that you can actually re-enable the cache and get a real Athlon if you're lucky and your Duron's cache isn't really defective, but failed quality control for some other reason. Unlike previous Durons, this one finally got a 133MHz FSB so that performance is not much behind equally-clocked Athlons in many tasks, plus it has a nice low power consumption which makes it great for overclocking. This chip was made in August 2003 and is the youngest I currently have.


AMD Athlon-XP 2600+ 2133MHz (Thoroughbred-B)
This Athlon is currently the fastest I have. You may say it's a plain Athlon, but in my eyes it's a special one - it has a 133MHz FSB (the last model to have that) which makes it the perfect upgrade chip for older mainboards as today's XP-2600+ processors either have a 166MHz bus or use the later Barton core. Given the lower bus speed, it runs at 2.13GHz to reach the same PR-value (I'm getting increasingly confused with all these PR-numberings I must admit) as a 2.08GHz Athlon with a 166MHZ bus or the 1.92GHz Barton. This model was introduced in August 2002, this particular chip was made in February 2002.


Sorry for me not adding the fairchilds, but I'm still looking for information on these. There's a huge pile left to be added the next weeks, notably some chips from santa clause who seems to live in Berlin -- Thank you, santa!

- Grampa

[DoomWarrior]

the PR Value isn't that confusing. It based on a 1000Mhz Tunderbird. It compare "your" Athlon with the 1000Mhz Thunderbird. So a 3000+ should be 3 times faster than a 1Ghz Thunderbird.

I read often that PR means Pentium Rating, thats not true. It means Performance Rating

[Grampa]

Yes, I know, a really common mistake. Even popular magazines make that mistake by demanding a change in AMD's PR-values as the values don't match the P-IV speeds . e.g. look here, last bold paragraph)

What I meant by "confusing" is the fact that given a PR between 2000+ and 3000+, with some processors you just can't tell if it's a Barton/Thorton/Thoroughbred/Palomino core and if it's a FSB133/FSB166 or FSB200 chip.
Maybe I'm just lacking a complete list

- Grampa

[DoomWarrior]

you need a complete list... no problem

http://www.au-ja.org/artikel-athlon-cpucore.phtml