Barton Comes to Town

Although there's still quite a bit of months to go before we'll see the K8 (Athlon 64) debut, we're pretty glad that the long-awaited Athlon XP processor based on the Barton core has finally arrived out of AMD's 0.13µm fab. If you've been studying AMD's roadmap, you'll immediately know that Barton is AMD's answer to Intel's Northwood core. For those who don't know yet, the Barton is equipped with 512KB of Level 2 cache running at the full processor's speed.

Now that there is twice as much cache as the previous Thoroughbred core, there's definitely quite a bit of performance increase expected. We've already seen how much the Pentium 4 benefited from the increase in cache and we should expect just as much gain, if not more. The Barton is still based on the same manufacturing technology, and thus, the die size is slightly larger than the Thoroughbred. Although we can't be approximately sure, we estimated the die area to be roughly the same (or maybe slightly less) than the Palomino.

The Barton core (left) is slightly larger than the Thoroughbred core (right) - due to the extra silicon real estate needed for an additional 256KB of L2 cache.

The other good news to upgraders is that the new Athlon XP 3000+ will be based on the same socket form factor as any other Athlon processors released since the Thunderbird core. This means that upgraders can immediately take advantage of the processor as any motherboard that supports 333MHz FSB should have no problems running this CPU.

So, just how fast is the Athlon XP 3000+? As we know, AMD has chosen to put model numbers on their processors and each processor core are graded according to their performance. Therefore, a Barton processor with a 3000+ model number may not necessarily be running at higher clock speeds than the older 2800+ due to the higher Level 2 cache. Now, this may be a bit confusing to some, but all will be revealed in the next page.

The label on the processor suggests that the Barton was manufactured sometime in January. Looks like it's really "fresh from the oven".