Whats an Athlon XP?
Ever used a Thunderbird, AKA pretty much any Athlon from 900MHz to 1.4GHz? The Athlon XP is a revised version of the old Athlon Thunderbird designed for more scalability and better performance (see the next paragraph for more). If you’ve ever heard of the Athlon 4, this is it. (I guess they decided “Athlon 4” would be a little too copycattish, especially considering there wasn’t an Athlon 2 or 3.) Palomino cores are very much an improvement over their Thunderbird counterparts. First of all, they use less power and thus run cooler. Thankfully, at that; it’s about time to start looking at ways to make the chip run cooler when people start talking enthusiatically about cooling methods that make absolute zero look like an oven. Additionally, the chip has much-improved (well, existent) hardware pre-fetch; hardware pre-fetch logic basically tries to anticipate what data will be needed from the computer’s main memory next and preemptively loads this data into the processor’s L1 cache. This al
