AMD Palomino, Barton or Thoroughbred?

[andreadebiase]

Sorry guys, i have been out of the scene for AMD processors. I am still running Athlon 1Ghz and was thinking to upgrade mobo. So in a nutshell how exaclty different are these three different "flavors" for AMD XP processors? which i should go for?
thank you

[Orion]

Well, in a nutshell, and without details of which I am unsure, here's the difference:

Palamino runs hotter and I beleive on a larger die (I'm at work, and don't have access to my tomes of computer knowledge) than the t-bred, and is currently being phased out. I don't even know if you can still buy any palaminos, but I would assume that you can if yo go for a low enough number of Athlon.

Thouroughbred (A revision) was an upgrade of the Palamino, I think they went to the t-bred somewhere mid-2000 (in athlon number), and then worked backwards, however I could be wrong on that. suffice to say it runs cooler, and more efficiently than the Palamino. it wasn't good enough for the nice people at AMD, who quite soon came out with:

Thouroughbred (B Revision). If you don't have the money to go for a Barton, this is the core to go for, pretty much. they run cooler and more efficiently than the t-bred A and in fact, all the T-breds are being (or perhaps already are) phased out in favor of this core. sadly, I don't have my magazines to back me up on this, but I beleive t-breds run on a .13 micron die, whereas the palaminos were a .15. also, I seem to remember the specific difference between the A and B was an extra layer of some sort...anyone know if I'm remembering correctly? anyways, I beleive almost all T-bred Bs run on the 266 FSB, except the top 2 or 3 levels, the 2800+, the 2500+ and I beleive there's one more that runs on the 333 MHz FSB. they all have 256 K of L2 Cache, which brings up the most recent desktop processor released....

The Barton. this is basically a T-Bred B on a 333 FSB (and soon to be 400 FSB) with 512 L2 Cache. of course, as many people point out, the Athlon gains less than the Pentium with a doubled cache, but the gain is still evident. the Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton) is clocked lower than the Athlon XP 2800+ (T-Bred B) and from what I've seen in Anandtechs site, it performs better in most cases. of course, it is also more expensive, but considering AMD's computing power per dollar ratio, it usually is worth it.

Anyways, that's what I can dredge from the depths of my memory, if I'm wrong, please, by all means, correct me....
Orion

[killercow]

I recently was looking for a new processor with 333-400mhz FSB. I thought that was the fastest so far. The next day I come back shopping and what do you know. Intel has an 800Mhz FSB P4 3gigs!!! Is there a mobo that can handle that???

[saphalline]

Yep. Any mobo with an 800FSB certified chipset. These include the i865P, i865PE, i875P, and SiS 658. There might be one or two more I missed...