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The physical
attributes of the Athlon XP certainly haven't changed much.
With the exception of the new green grid array packaging,
physically there is nothing out of the ordinary to report
about the Athlon XP 2100+. If you're wondering why AMD
is making the switch to green packaging, we've got the
answer. It has nothing to do with performance, but
rather to make the CPU's color and appearance more closely
match AMD's company logo. So you can all stop
speculating! We will however, try to explain what
those 37.5 million transistors under the hood are up to.
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The
Athlon XP 2100+ Exposed |
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What's going on in
there!?! |
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We used H-Oda's
popular WCPUID to see what it can tell us about the inner
workings of AMD's new flagship processor. As most of
you already know, the 2100+ moniker is not used to denote
actual clock speed but rather the processor's relative
performance rating, when compared to other x86 CPUs in its
class.
CPU and
Cache ID
As you can see,
the AMD Athlon 2100+ is running at an actual clock speed of
1733MHz (1737MHz. in our screenshot due to the slightly more
aggressive timings of our nForce powered reference board).
This clock speed is attained using a multiplier of 13 and a
front side bus of 133Mhz. (13x133=1733). We also took
a snapshot of the CacheID information. Athlon XPs are
equipped with 64K of 2-Way set associative Instruction L1
cache, 64K of 2-Way set associative data L1 cache and 256K
of full speed, 16-Way set associative L2 cache, for a grand
total of 384K of effective on chip cache. Up until
recently, the Athlon XPs held a slight edge in this area
over the original Pentium 4 Willamette core with 256K.
However, with the release of the "Northwood" P4, Intel has
increased their cache size to 512K.
We'd should also
quickly mention that The Athlon XP 2100+ requires the same
1.75 volts to operate as other Athlon XP CPUs, and needs a
cooler that can dissipate a similar amount of heat to the
2000+. Throughout our testing we used a ThermalRight
SK-6 with a 38CFM fan and core temperatures never went past
44°C at full load.
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Overclocking
The
2100+ |
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An AMD .18 core at
2GHz.? Perhaps (We'll have to tell ya
later!) |
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Unfortunately,
we've only had our CPU for a few days and were not able to
sufficiently unlock and properly test the overclocking
potential of our particular Athlon XP 2100+. However,
even without a run of overclocked benchmark scores, there is
still some interesting information we can cover with regards
to overclocking...
If you're an
avid reader of sites like HotHardware, you have undoubtedly
heard of the procedures to unlock Athlon processors by
connecting the L1 bridges on the top of the CPU. Back
in the early "Thunderbird" days, a number 2 pencil was all
that was needed to connect these bridges and unlock your
CPU's multiplier. Since then, things have hanged
slightly with the "Palomino" based Athlon XPs. Users
are still required to connects the L1 bridges to unlock
their CPU but now there are deep (relatively speaking)
valleys that need to be filled with non-electrically
conductive material before you can connect the bridges.
Some users, however, have found that their new CPUs also had
burned traces on their L1 bridges, making them impossible to
connect. Rumors started circulating that AMD had
started "hard locking" their CPUs, much to the dismay of the
enthusiast community. Take a look at these close-ups.
The Bad...
The Good...
The picture on
the left is a close-up of an Athlon XP 2000+ we recently
acquired, and the picture on the right is a close-up of the
Athlon XP 2100+ we tested in this article. Notice that
the traces on the 2000+ are almost completely burned, making
this CPU impossible to unlock. The 2100+ on the other
hand is cut very cleanly. Also worth mentioning is
that the CPU on the left was an AGOGA stepping, while the
2100+ CPU on the right was a newer AGOIA stepping, so we can
deduce that burning the traces is not something AMD is doing
with all of their newer CPUs. Some other hardware
sites had mentioned that they received official work from
AMD, that they have NOT changed their stance on locking
their CPUs. If you ask us, we would theorize that
quite possibly the machinery used to cut the traces was
simply out of alignment when a large batch of CPUs passed
through it. We're just speculating here however.
So, unless AMD comes forth tomorrow and says they will be
hard locking all of their future CPUs, we can all let out a
collective sigh of relief.
On to
the Benchmarks!
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