Signal Ground: Athlon Buyers’ Guide

[ Thanks to Ken
Treis for this link. ]

This article provides more than enough information to figure out
which way to go on building an AMD-based system. Information on the
Athlon, Duron, and the assorted branches of the family tree is
provided. Hardware geeks may already know all this, but it’s a
handy overview for people who are venturing into putting together
their own system and want to know the lay of the land. Kernel
compile benchmarks are included.

“As we popped the Duron chip out of our test board and
dropped in a 1.2 GHz Thunderbird, we couldn’t help but feel that we
were making a significant upgrade. “Move over, kid,” we thought as
we substituted silicon for silicon. But what difference would the
big brother ultimately make? Would the upgrade simply boost our
egos, or would the new chip’s performance really shine in our
everyday computing activities? If it did make a difference, how
much of that was due to the architectural variations between the
Duron and Athlon?

Never content to let questions like this remain unanswered, we
whipped out the specs and benchmarks. But in order to understand
the current generation of AMD chips, it’s important to first
examine the lineage of the Athlon family.”

Complete
Story