Xbit-labs got an engineering sample of AMD’s Athlon 64 rated at 2800+. Although it has a fairly high performance ratio, it’s core speed is only 1.6GHz. But their sample featured 1MB L2 cache, and DDR 400 support. They stated:
“Speaking about the performance of Athlon 64 in traditional 32bit applications we can say that this new CPU boasts a few very remarkable and strong features: large L2 cache, high-performance memory subsystem and SSE2 instructions support. On the other scale we see relatively low core frequency. As a result, we see either a performance boost or a performance drop depending on each particular application and its critical parameters.”
