The death of Athlon XP

[Gareth]

source: www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/amd_kills_athlon_xp

Briefly, AMD has updated its public roadmap. The biggest change: the death of its Athlon XP brand. Instead, AMD has fully committed itself to the Sempron brand.

IMO, Athlon XP has been a huge success for AMD and really brought them back into the limelight as a major chip vendor. Let's hope this continues with the Sempron.

I'll be glad when they get a Sempron 400FSB out then. They only have 333MHZ ones so far.

Looks like I'll have to go with the Sempron now.

[IanGuy]

Sempron only has 256kb cache whereas the barton Athlon XP's had 512. Big drop in performance if you ask me.

The Sempron 3000+ has a 512KB, and there isn't much difference in performance with the Sempron 2500+, and the Athlon XP 2500+. Only a very slight drop with the Sempron due to the cache size.

[Graham M]

Can anyone explain to me what the difference is between the Athlon and Sempron are, different di size? Better/worse performance, I thought they were the budget versions like the Durons used to be, what's going on then? :worried:

The benchmark I saw, the Sempron is basically the same performance as the Athlon XP, just that it's cheaper, and has a different core.

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by Zeph

Can anyone explain to me what the difference is between the Athlon and Sempron are, different di size? Better/worse performance, I thought they were the budget versions like the Durons used to be, what's going on then? :worried:

The Sempron is the new Duron, duRON ... sempRON, It's AMD's budget range of processors.

For general CPU usage (i.e. not just gaming) a Sempron 2800 is slightly faster than the Athlon XP 2500, whereas the Athlon XP 2800 outclasses it easily (mind you, so does the Celeron 335 in a lot of gaming tests). It's sit's performance wise somewhere between the Duron and the Athlon XP.

[keithwalton]

The sempron is an athlon xp, for the time being at least, they are surplus core's that they couldnt ship as xp's anymore so they were rebranded as a budget chip, slowly they were meant to phase out the xp, which is looks like they are doing. Currently at best you'll get a tbred b core sempron though there are some barton based ones on the way.

Oh i did forget to mention that they decided to bump the numbers up abit in there pr ranking thing. though some specs remain the same as before

[etccarmageddon]

arent some of the top range Semprons cut down versions of the athlon 64? ie. they use socket 754 instead of socket A?

this is getting very misleading/confusing cos you might buy a low end sempron and expect to be able to upgrade your chip to a 3100 but find out that it would need a new motherboard.

[altis]

I thought so.

I recently noticed Scan and Dabs running down their stock of XPs.

[SteveE]

Pc's are now what hifi was in the past:- a tool to get as much money from your pockets and into the chip makers,motherboard makers,memory makers etc bank accounts why else would they change pin/socket config so often?its called built-in obsolescence(dont know if thats spelled correctly!):-if you want to update one component after a short time you cant,thats the main reason AMD/Intel change their chips so often its not really to offer the end user any real advantage in performance!

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by SteveE

thats the main reason AMD/Intel change their chips so often its not really to offer the end user any real advantage in performance!

I disagree with you there, I've noticed a marked improvement going from an Athlon XP 3200 (Socket A) to an Athlon 64 3500 (Socket 939), when I went from a Pentium 233 (S-Socket 7) to a Slot P2, again, massive improvement, no-one forces people to upgrade straight away and I think whatever is current at the time lasts long enough for people to wait until something comes along that will make a noticable difference.

[SteveE]

Originally Posted by Bifta

I disagree with you there, I've noticed a marked improvement going from an Athlon XP 3200 (Socket A) to an Athlon 64 3500 (Socket 939), when I went from a Pentium 233 (S-Socket 7) to a Slot P2, again, massive improvement, no-one forces people to upgrade straight away and I think whatever is current at the time lasts long enough for people to wait until something comes along that will make a noticable difference.

The 2 examples you give socket A to Socket 939 And socket 7 to slot 1 there was quite a time lapse between upgrades nowadays every new cpu intel(amd aren't as bad) bring out seems to have a different pin config it just makes me wonder(and cynical!) if they are not in league with motherboard manufactureres so when you "upgrade"your chip you have to also "upgrade" your motherboard and in turn "upgrade" your graphics card (soon cos there will be no agp slot!) and upgrade your memory because the "outdated stuff"(6 months old!) you have wont fit!.As for a marked improvement using an Athlon 64 have you not also found a marked increase in problems getting some apps to run correctly?As for not being forced to upgrade straight away agree with you but I do feel the PC mags do go quite a way in brainwashing folk to think they have to,after all most of their revenue comes from advertisements and if stuff doesn't sell they lose money and eventually have to fold

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by SteveE

The 2 examples you give socket A to Socket 939 And socket 7 to slot 1 there was quite a time lapse between upgrades nowadays every new cpu intel(amd aren't as bad) bring out seems to have a different pin config it just makes me wonder(and cynical!) if they are not in league with motherboard manufactureres so when you "upgrade"your chip you have to also "upgrade" your motherboard and in turn "upgrade" your graphics card(soon cos there will be no agp slot!)

AGP has been a standard for at least 5 years.

and upgrade your memory because the "outdated stuff"(6 months old!) you have wont fit!

184pin DDR has also been a standard for years.

As for a marked improvement using an Athlon 64 have you not also found a marked increase in problems getting some apps to run correctly?

No, absolutely everything runs perfectly.

I for one am perfectly happy for new standards to be introduced. If buying a new motherboard allows me to run faster processors, faster memory (DDR2) and SLI'd video cards then I'm perfectly happy to pay for it, however, if I wasn't happy I wouldn't bother upgrading for a long time to come but moaning about it wouldn't get me anywhere.

[keithwalton]

Socket 478 was also a standard for intel for quite sometime. Pretty much the entire life of the P4 so far. Amd stuck with socket A for donkeys too, both of which have outlived themselves. At least when intel recently changed there mainstream socket to the 775 standard, they did everything at once (pci-e ddr2 etc) all at once to get the standard change over and done with in one fell swoop. But they did leave some room for backward compatibility in the 915 set in that it supported ddr ram as ddr-2 was still rather scarce at the time of release.
I do believe amd have faltered on this point, with the whole socket 754/939/940 thing. Yes they needid seperation between the different grades of chips but i'm sure it wouldnt of been that difficult to get a 754 chip to work in a 939/940 board so at least you had the chance to upgrade to the higher spec chips without changing the mobo again.
Intel made this mistake with socket 423 being a dead end interim, yet amd make the same mistake 2 years down the line.

As for the skt 754 sempron's, indeed the top end of them is an a64 with the 64bit part disabled. Yet somehow it gets a higher model ranking than a similarly clocked fully fledged a64, and not much cheaper either.

Edit - the two chips in question.
Sempron 3100+ - £81, 1.8GHz 256 l2 cache. 32Bit only chip, correction its a 1.8GHz cpu not 2G as ebuyer say
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=65077

A64 3000+ - £100, 2GHz 512 l2 cache, 64/32bit chip
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=58431