AMD Athlon 4 - The Palomino is Here

Athlon 4 Performance

Although we really wanted to give you all the performance of the workstation Athlon 4 here we couldn't since AMD is only announcing the mobile Athlon 4 today (even though they are the exact same CPU). Luckily, since they are the same CPU, the benchmarks AMD is releasing today are exactly what you can expect from the desktop and workstation versions of the Athlon 4 (except those won't appear at 1GHz and lower clock speeds).

We will save our benchmarks on the Athlon 4 until the official workstation processor release but if you're interested, AMD is providing benchmarks on the processor that indicate a 2 - 15% increase in performance over an identically clocked Thunderbird. Some interesting numbers to quote from AMD include a 6% advantage under Quake III Arena, a 5% increase under Business Winstone 2001 and a 10% advantage under SYSMark 2000. The majority of this performance increase does come from the data prefetch of the Athlon 4.

Mobile Athlon 4 (PGA) vs Mobile Pentium III (BGA)

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In terms of notebook performance, the mobile Athlon 4 should offer a considerable performance advantage over the mobile Pentium III. However the one advantage that the mobile Pentium III still does have is that it is available in a much smaller packaging and is thus able to be in much smaller form factor notebooks.

Mobile Athlon 4 vs Mobile Pentium III Module (Chipset + CPU)

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