AMD's 760 Chipset: DDR for the Athlon is here

Final Words

DDR SDRAM is finally here and with it the Athlon has also received a bump in its already speed FSB operating frequency, but at what performance benefit to the end user?

In general you're looking at a 10% increase in performance across the board when using PC2100 DDR SDRAM, using PC1600 DDR SDRAM will obviously yield lower results. While there will be some applications that will benefit more from DDR SDRAM and the increased FSB (servers, high end workstations, etc...) there will be other situations in which DDR SDRAM doesn't do much at all (office applications, web browsing, etc...).

If you currently own an Athlon running on a KT133 board, you'll probably want to save your money and upgrade when the next generation Athlon hits the streets instead of upgrading now for an extra 10% boost. There won't be much of a reason to go with 100MHz FSB Athlons after the first AMD 760 boards start hitting the streets later this year. You can probably expect to see the first boards surface in the next 1 - 2 months, with OEMs taking orders for systems very soon. However don't expect to see AMD 760 boards in major retail systems until sometime next year.

As far as price is concerned, the AMD 760 chipset will most likely be more expensive than the KT133. Combine that with the fact that the 133MHz FSB Athlons are carrying a small price premium over their 100MHz siblings ($20 - $50 extra for the 133MHz FSB parts), and the added cost of DDR SDRAM (assuming you're going for PC2100 DDR SDRAM) you're probably going to find yourself wanting to wait before committing to such a major upgrade.

In comparison to the upcoming Pentium 4, even with DDR SDRAM and the 133MHz FSB it may be difficult for a 1.2GHz Athlon to compete with a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 in many benchmarks. AMD may be forced to release a higher clocked Athlon in order to remain competitive performance-wise, however they will almost definitely hold the price to performance ratio crown throughout the rest of the year.

In the end, the move to the AMD 760 chipset is very well received by the Athlon as it is no longer held back by the memory performance limitations of the KT133. And while we hope that VIA's DDR chipset will prove to be even better than the AMD 760, our true hope for the Athlon platform lies in the successor to the Thunderbird core, let's hope that the next incarnation of the Athlon core is a much cooler running one. It should be interesting to see what AMD positions against the Pentium 4 after the Thunderbird core is replaced...