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About 2 1/2 months ago, we previewed what we thought the Athlon XP3200+ would look like. Aside from a fake Photoshop picture we showed industry norm benchmarks to give an idea what to expect from the next speed bump of AMD's 32 bit flagship processor . As it turns out, we could not have been much closer to the real thing that is unveiled today. More interesting, though are some performance issues pertaining to running the nForce2 chipset in APIC mode as opposed to the old-fashioned PIC mode. Up to 20% performance increase in selected multimedia benchmarks like Content Creation Winstones speak a very bold language but we have all the details in the following.

Some 2 ½ months ago we did a preview of a hypothetical Athlon XP 3200+ running at the same clock speed as the XP 3000+ but at a 400 MHz processor bus speed. Actually, not quite so, since for the sake of comparing apples with apples, we were running at 197 MHz external processor bus for a clock speed of 2167 MHz and a total interface bandwidth of 3152 MBs. Hence, technically, the processor in question was an XP3152+ rather than an XP 3200+. Needless to say that AMD would not release a 3152+ rating, it doesn't really roll off the tongue as well as 3200+, which furthermore, adds another twist to the naming convention scheme employed by AMD.

Coincidence or not, the 3200+ rating is a fitting glove for the new speed grade, as long as the other XP revisions will not be subjected to a global renaming scheme assigning 2100 and 2700 to all other speed grades. What else is new about the new speed king in AMD's 32 bit processor line? For once, it is the fastest currently available processor from AMD, even if the difference is a mere 33 MHz over the original XP3000+. There are no changes in the silicon, the blueprint is the same, so are the power consumption and thermal dissipation figures.

Barton Core-Based Athlon XP3200+. This time around, it is the real thing, not a Photopshop Montage

The real difference is that the bus frequency has finally experienced the long overdue bump to 200 MHz DDR or 400 MHz data rate that was projected already in 1999 at the launch of the original Athlon. For more information on the side lines, we have covered pretty much all issues involved in raising the bus speed about eight months ago in this article.

After dispelling the myths surrounding the bus threshold, meaning that the processor itself might not be able to run at a certain bus speed, the real challenge for AMD has been the issue of finding adequate platforms that would actually run reliably at a 200 MHz bus interface. The emphasis here is on reliability; overclocker's circles had been running at 200 MHz bus speed or beyond for some time now, albeit under conditions that would cause any of the legal eagles at AMD to do the three monkeys. As it turns out, only about 10-20% of all silicon of the original nForce2 chipset revisions were able to actually function at 200 MHz bus speed. This is still not bad considering that at its inception the chipset was not intended for that speed but it is not good enough for the launch of a new platform

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