And lest we should leave the topic of the new names without pointing this out, one must stop and take note of the 'XP' in the name. Now by this point, we've all heard that the 'XP' in the Athlon XP's name stands for 'extreme performance.' But I will once again refer you all to the same FAQ about the Athlon XP processor line on AMD's web site, where they state "The "XP" modifier is designed to convey the extreme performance AMD Athlon XP processors deliver for Microsoft® Windows® XP operating system." What about those of us who don't like the whole activation deal and are sticking with Windows 2000 or even Windows 98SE? Or those who wouldn't touch a Microsoft operating system with a ten-foot pole and will be loading Linux onto their systems? Do we all get the same 'extreme performance?' Of course we do, but the timing of this processor line's release coinciding with the release of Microsoft's latest operating systems has no doubt made it desirable to get that XP into the name. NVIDIA did it with their Detonator XP drivers, after all. So why shouldn't AMD do the same with their latest processor line?

While I didn't go quite as far as my colleague, Eric Grevstad of Hardware Central, who exclaimed "That's so cheesy!" when the folks from AMD first told us the new processor line's name back in August, I do certainly agree that it will do more to turn off the white-box enthusiast crowd than it likely will to attract Joe consumer. Add to this their promoting QuantiSpeed architecture as AMD's answer to Intel's Netburst architecture (a more appropriate response would have been to just chuckle at Intel for it) and it really leads many of us to question the wisdom of AMD following this marketing path.

Here, in any case, is a chart that lists the model numbers and their actual operating frequencies, taken directly from an AMD press presentation on the Athlon XP 1800+ family.

This may have so far seemed to be a negative review; but I assure you that any negativity felt toward the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ and the other Athlon XP processors is restricted to its naming and marketing... and even at that, I will be the first to point out that I have zero experience in developing marketing efforts for PC processors, so perhaps I and the other reviewers who have questioned this will be shown to be wrong. What most of us agree on with AMD, however, is that the performance of the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor, like that the AMD Athlon processors that preceded them, is impressive. And while I am not a fan of the catchy names for architectural improvements (Netburst, QuantiSpeed, etc.), I am a fan of good performance. And that's one area where AMD has consistently delivered on these past years.

Catchy names aside, the QuantiSpeed architecture offers some important technological advances, delivering the same SSE support (3DNow! Professional), hardware data pre-fetching, exclusive and speculative Translation Look-aside Buffers, and reduced power consumption found in previous Palomino chipsets, the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ takes this next step from firm ground. And its inclusion of a thermal diode to keep tabs on how hot your processor is running should help ensure that your processor doesn't go up in smoke if your HSF ever fails on you.

To test the performance of the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor, we'll be turning to the usual suspects of SysMark 2001, 3DMark 2001, and Quake3 Arena and comparing the performance of this processor to the 1.4GHz AMD Athlon and the 2.0GHz and 1.8GHz Intel P4's.

But first, let's take a look at our setups.