Introduction

AMD has been putting on a real marketing clinic of late. Although many in the industry panned their use of PR ratings to denote actual performance, there can be little doubt the move has been a huge success. Athlon XP sales are extremely good and vendor penetration has reached an all-time high. The latest coup is the Athlon XP 2000+, which coincidentally was released on the exact same day as Intel unveiled their Pentium 4 Northwood 2.0A and 2.2 GHz chips. This move was obviously intended to take as much wind out of the Northwood sales as possible, which is something AMD has found themselves on the receiving end of more than once.

These two processor releases are quite different, as Intel introduced an enhanced Northwood core design, shrunk to 0.13-micron and featuring a spacious 512K L2 cache. The Athlon XP 2000+ is on the other end of the spectrum, being just a 66 MHz core speed jump over the previous Athlon XP 1900+. What this new processor really does is give AMD a 2 GHz equivalent chip to market and lights a fire under Intel once again. It may not be the much-anticipated 0.13-micron Thoroughbred core, but the Athlon XP 2000+ does up AMD's ante in the performance war.

Another interesting aspect to the Athlon XP 2000+ release is that AMD finally has an "even number" performance processor, at least in theory. Even though it does run at 1.67 GHz, the 2000+ moniker will definitely help it with the general public, who definitely like their speed records in easy to digest numbers. The performance crowd is a bit more difficult to please and need more steak to go with the 2000+ sizzle. How well its performance matches up to the new Pentium 4-2.2 GHz will be a far more telling indication of its success with enthusiasts.