As the life of the Athlon XP comes to an end. AMD have had one final push with a new core. This time round we have the Barton Core. The essential difference to the user is the 512K level 2 cache as opposed to that of the Thoroughbred which has only 256K. The difference to the manufacturer is that it now has a much larger die size (see picture below). Barton also runs on either a 333Mhz or now a 400Mhz FSB.

(T-Bred left  -  Barton right)

The larger Die size means that the production costs are higher than that of the Thoroughbred core. Prices are likely to be slightly higher as well due to this.

AMD have pushed up to the 400Mhz FSB with the Barton Core. Intel however have now gone for a 800Mhz FSB chip which is currently out performing AMD. Price however is still on AMD's side. Overall clock speed is still fairly low. Lower in fact than that of the Thoroughbred cores. The Extra cache was hoped to help the lower clock frequencies. This can be OK in some circumstances but also have a negative effect in others as you can imagine. Raw processing power is always dependent on the clock speed of the CPU.

Looking at overclocking it seems that you can get a fair few MHz out of the new 3200+ because it is clocked so low in the first place. However it is the Bus speed increase which has made the performance of the 3200+ so much better than that of the 3000+. The difference in actual MHz is only 33Mhz, nothing really in the grand scale of things today.

Why have extra cache?

So we have already said that the main difference between the Barton and the Thoroughbred core is the 512K cache on the Barton. Really as an end user you will want to know what extra cache does for you. We will start by looking at what the cache on your CPU actually is.

The cache is like a bridge between your CPU and the main memory. The main memory holds everything that your CPU needs to access. The problem is that the main memory is much much slower than today's CPU's and also it is located away from the Processor chip causing time delays. This is where you CPU's cache comes in. The on-chip cache holds frequently accessed data as well as data that is stored around it. The idea being that the data around frequently accessed data will be required at some point.

The performance benefits are that when data is required that is stored in cache, the CPU has to wait a fraction of the time to receive it and so the process becomes faster. More cache is better then? in short yes. In Long terms, yes but its not cost effective and also some applications do not rely on cache memory and those that do, do not require 100's of megabytes of it.

Multimedia applications such as video and MP3's do not make good use of cache and so the extra cache on the Barton core would make no difference at all. With things such as games and office applications where the same calculations and data are required multiple times, the extra cache can improve performance dramatically.

Another step forward for AMD, in what most people think is the last step before 64-bit computing comes to us with the Athlon64. The extra cache is a boost for the XP but its clock speed is still fairly limited against that of the Pentium 4. The larger Die size means higher production costs, so I can't see these chips being readily available for ages.

Worth upgrading if your coming from a Palomino or below. You may find that if you are already using a high end T-Bred then the performance increase may not be massive for you. This all depends on whether or not you would use the extra cache in your everyday PC use.

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