A Brief Introduction Of Both Cores

Everything that has a beginning has an end.

The battle of the AMD Athlon and the Intel Pentium 4 has been going on for years now. It eventually came to an end in the second quarter of 2003 when both companies released roadmaps that revealed that the Barton 3200+ and the Pentium 4C 3.2GHz would be the last of their generation.

The Barton core was introduced by AMD in February 2003. This core with 54.3 million transistors was based on the good old K7 Athlon architecture which had undergone numerous enhancements since its introduction in 1999. It has gone from the Thunderbird to the Palomino, followed by the Thoroughbreds A and B; and finally the Barton core. With that, AMD engineers signs off on the K7 Athlon architecture.

The only difference between the Barton core and the Thoroughbred core is the size of the L2 cache. The Barton comes with 512KB of L2 cache; compared to the Throughbred's 256KB L2 cache. The extra 256KB cache helps to boost the Barton's performance in cache-friendly applications. Other than that, they are architecturally-identical cores.

The Barton 2500+ processor that we have runs at the same FSB speed (166MHz) as the Thoroughbred-based Athlon XP. The top of the line Barton 3200+ leaps one step forward to the world of 200MHz FSB with an operating voltage of 1.65V.