Drawing Some Conclusions?
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Are our overclocking results with the Thoroughbred processors typical of what you will see with retail processors? It’s really unclear at this point as there are too many factors and theories floating around. Over at Van’s Hardware they have theorized that these first Athlon XP processors based on the Thoroughbred core were optimized for the mobile market, and thus their scalability was lost in the process. Others are claiming it just as simple to say that AMD didn’t know how to properly run at a .13-micron fabrication center.Based on the other results I have seen on the Athlon XP 2200+ processor, I surely have to admit that my results are atypical from what you should expect if you got your hands on a first run processor, or if the retail processors that reach the market are the same as the ones reviewer’s received. You could find yourself with a processor that overclocks only 25 MHz, like the folks at Anandtech, or you could get one that overclocks to about 2 GHz, like the one at HardOCP. It is even possible that you get one that can go beyond the 2.1 GHz that I reached in this article. Just like with any other processor core, AMD or Intel, there are going to be good eggs and bad eggs, and finding the right one might take some research, or perhaps just as much luck as anything else. But, at this time, I think buying a Thoroughbred hoping to reach even the 2 GHz mark would be a bad assumption to take.
And now we are left with the same very basic problem that I was going to attempt to unravel at the start of this article. With the three processors I’ve seen and tested based on the new Thoroughbred core, I have overclocked one by 117 MHz, one by 200 MHz and another by over 300 MHz. What is our statistical norm then? What would consumers see when purchasing their own Thoroughbred processor? In order to know with degree of credibility, we would have to do a lot more testing on hundreds, if not thousands, of processors. That is obviously not something we can just sit down and do here at Amdmb.com. It will take months, probably, for enough product (based on the Thoroughbred core) to get out into the hands of the users so we can begin to see results from that many processors. It looks like we will have to wait until then to get a good consensus on the power of the initial release of the Thoroughbred processor.
Thanks for reading, and I welcome all of your comments to my email address, rshrout@amdmb.com or in this thread at the Amdmb.com Forums.
