hey guys, I thought that you could help me a little. What is the big hype over the new Athlon XP? What seperates it from the rest. Thanx a bunch!
The Athlon XP adds the SSE 1 instruction set to the chipset so it's now able to surpass the P4 on a few of the benchmarks it was losing at before. For example video creation using Windows Media used to favour Intel quite heavily due to the SSE instructions, now that AMD has added support it has caught up and even surpassed Intel in some content creation tests. They've also added thermal diode to the chip which should be able to monitor temperature and slow it down if it gets too hot although from what I've read it doesn't work too well and Intel is far ahead of them in that respect. And finally they've reduced the amount of power needed to run the chip and the heat the chip produces has been reduced as well by AMD's switch from ceramic to organic pcb.