New Features
Based on Tom's Hardware Guide http://www.tomshardware.com , the AthlonXP does indeed offer 3-7% more performance per clock than previous desktop-Athlons based on the "Thunderbird"-core, because it is based on the new "Palomino"-core that we already know from AMD's multi-processor offering AthlonMP and the Mobile Athlon4 processors.
Palomino's added features over Thunderbird :
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New design to reduce power consumption over Thunderbird core by 20%. |
| Implementation of the full Intel SSE instruction set. The SSE processor flag is set (if the motherboard BIOS supports Palomino) so that software can recognize AthlonMP as a SSE-capable processor. AMD calls its SSE-implementation '3Dnow! Professional'. |
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Hardware auto data pre-fetching unit. |
| L1 Data TLB (Translation Look-Aside Buffer) was increased from 32 to 40 entries, the architecture of the data and instruction L1 and L2 TLBs was made exclusive and TLB-entries can be written speculatively. |
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Implementation of a thermal diode to monitor processor temperature. |
