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The latest AMD CPU, Athlon XP 1900+ is the logical next step up from the Athlon XP 1800+. For those using the CPU at stock settings, that is without any overclocking, the XP 1900 offers enough extra kick to warrant going with the highest speed grade available. There is, however the caveat of increasing latencies with every additional stepping up of the multiplier and this makes it harder and harder for the CPU to keep up with the data flow to and from the system.

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On a clock by clock comparison, therefore, it is not surprising at all that the Athlon XP1800+ outruns its big brother in about every single benchmark. Granted, the 1800XP+ we have here appears to be an extremely healthy and overclocking friendly specimen reaching almost the same clock speed as the 1900+ used here but this may not be the standard scenario. We have word of XP1900 running up to 1800 MHz real clock speed which does not appear within the capabilities of even our XP1800+, at least not when the same requirements for stability are applied.

All in all, the results from this review still leave one big question centering around where AMD is going to go next. Multiplier values can be increased internally without too much effort, but it was only some 2 years ago when Shiloh A. Jennings at HPC hinted that even a 6x multiplier of the K6 series was detrimental for the system performance. Granted, in that case, the multiplier also included the L2 cache which made things even worse but the general conclusion still holds. Essentially, what is needed is the next step up in fsb frequency combined with the move to DDR 333. Even though it is not officially supported, there is enough evidence that most of the recently released chipsets do have support for a 1/5th or even 1/6th PCI divider and since the PCI bus does not contribute too much to the system performance this may be the correct solution.

What is needed in this case is simply the official commitment of the chipset industry to officially condone the next step in FSB/memory frequencies, which is 166 MHz. In this case, the 12x multiplier would really mean a true 2 GHz clock frequency. The caveat is that this could leave all but the high end suppliers of DRAM stranded, however, AMD should not be concerned about the welfare of the commodity market DRAM suppliers which still have the Duron to dwell on. Realistically looked at, we have been running DDR DIMMs from a variety of manufacturers at 166 MHz and beyond for over 6 months now, so the supply is there. The numbers shown in this review very clearly show that the next step in FSB frequency will yield more performance than any additional multiplier increase.

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