question about the athlon xp and p4

[Shimmishim]

i remember reading a post somewhere about how the athlon xp doesn't really benefit from the new chipsets that support ddr333 while the p4 does... can somoene explain this to me?

 

[WarriorX]

The Athlon XP is limited by the 266 Mhz FSB, which AMD doesn't have any plans to change. So the speed from the cpu to the memory controller remains at 266 Mhz, while the speed from the memory controller to the memory is at 333 Mhz. The 266 Mhz is a bottleneck, so performance is barely increased (only because the latency drops between memory controller and memory).

 

[Shimmishim]

thanks a bunch.. that really helped 🙂

 

[rogue1979]

Remember, AMD cpu's can be unlocked. There are several boards that can run 180-200MHz fsb speeds stable with 1/5 and 1/6 pci dividers. 400MHz DDR is here, and the benchmarks from XP cpu's at 200MHz fsb speeds coupled with good DDR is amazing.