AMD's Athlon XP: Great performance, poor marketing

Introducing the Modeling System

We've already mentioned one of the Athlon XP models, the 1800+ but here is a full breakdown of the clock speeds and the corresponding model numbers for AMD's Athlon XP line:

AMD doesn't arbitrarily select model numbers according to how they feel performance stacks up to the competition, rather they use a collection of 14 widely used independent benchmarking applications and games (including SYSMark 2001, but more on that later) and determine the rating based on overall performance in those benchmarks.

In order to explain in simple but catchy terms why the Athlon XP is able to operate at a lower clock frequency yet obtain these high model numbers, AMD has coined the term "QuantiSpeed Architecture." In reality there is nothing new about the Athlon XP's "QuantiSpeed Architecture"; it's merely a way of saying that the Athlon XP can do more work in a single clock (higher IPC) than the Pentium 4.

The Athlon XPs also feature updated pricing: