Performance
As expected a 1GHz processor is not going to be slow, the question is how fast? We were unable to persuade Intel to part with their newly launched 1.1GHz processor; however, the two have been benchmarked elsewhere with the same benchmark utilities we use. It is clear from the core design of the AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor, it has more advantages than disadvantages over Intel's design, and it is hard to beat currently. At the end of the day it's not only one factor that determines performance, factors such as the chipset plays an important role, and in this area Intel is weak. Currently it offers chipsets based on the i820 and i840 solutions, both of which in our previous dealings with, we have been less than impressed. This leaves us with the current offering from AMD and clearly this has the edge. The Thunderbird processor performed very well in our 3DMARK 2000 (see figure 2) benchmark resulting in a score of 7487 (see figure 3) in 800 x 600-16bit and 6507 (see figure 4) in 1024 x 768-16bit modes. In our SYSmark 2000 benchmark returned a blistering score of 193 (see figure 5).

Additionally, we decided to test under Content Creation Winstone 2000 to ensure all our benchmarks were used. The result was an outstanding score of 36.1 (see figure 6). Taking into consideration we had a Motherboard that did not support ATA/100 and was not tweaked in any way, the results we obtained for the AMD Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird processor are currently the fastest we have seen in our labs. This clearly was not the case with the previous Athlon 1GHz processors; the L2 on-die cache clearly has made a tremendous difference. All in all, a stunning processor.

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