With the falling prices of Athlons and memory, the only outstanding question is how stable the DDR platform is for gamers, but we ll save that for our appraisal of the various motherboard chipsets another time. For the moment, the performance freak inside of us needs a workout. The first time AMD applied those three magical letters was two summers ago with the original Athlon, which transferred data back and forth to the rest of the system twice for every clock cycle, doubling the theoretical bandwidth at its disposal. Unlike the previous days of PC66, PC100 and PC133, the denotation here does not focus on maximum clock speed, but the theoretical memory bandwidth, hence PC1600 and PC2100. The large number indicates that the memory can handle X number of Megabytes data per second under ideal conditions.
Lets examine that phenomenon just briefly.
Now, it would be nice to have some way of explaining this away, but in reality it simply looks as though the Athlon can t quite take advantage of its own available bandwidth just yet. Even so, as remarked just a paragraph ago, in virtually all real world benchmarks, clock for clock the Athlon tramples all over the Pentium 4. The reason for that, some argue, is that SSE2, which the P4 thrives upon, isn t implemented in any real world programs yet. Suffice to say, it s this factor which will keep AMD ahead of Intel even when the latter s clock speeds eclipse those of the former by several hundred MHz. I don't like graphs where you chop off the entire graph and leave just the bit at the top where 'things happen'.