More Opteron benchmarks spotted, as Athlon 2400+ finally tips up

On the Operton front, German site 3DCenter has a SPEC CPU2000 benchmark comparison of of an Athlon XP, Athlon Thunderbird, Pentium 4, Xeon, Itanics 1 and 2 and AMD Opteron Models 1.2, 1.4, 1.8 and 2.0 GHz. They say the Opteron shows higher differences to the other processors on higher clock rates. It seems, they suggest, that Opteron is more scalable with higher frequencies. Wibble here for the German. And here's a Googled translation

And, in response to our piece here, entitled AMD reveals Opteron benchmarks at MPF, Donald C. Lindsay, Ph.D writes: "you implied that Intel's multithreading wouldn't help with SPEC scores.

"On the contrary," writes Dr Linday, "some years ago, Sun surprised everyone by showing that a multiprocessor helped with the "single threaded" tests. Their compiler was good enough to automatically parallize some of the floating point tests across the multiprocessor. SPEC allowed that, on the grounds that if the user didn't have to know, and it (always) got the right answer, then there was no reason to disallow such tricks. It's no different from having a one CPU with internal parallelism.

"So, if Intel can manage the same trick (not easy, BTW), they're entitled. Of course, it would be interesting to see how much it bought. Ideally, you'd hope for a factor of two, but inevitably there will be bottlenecks and contention. How much, I can't say offhand. Of course, someone could find out, right now, by hand-coding."

Right, back to business. DeviantPC has posted a review of Gigabyte's Radeon 9000 PRO. Here it is.

OCWorkbench has a fiddle with Shuttle's SB51G Pentium 4 board based on the new Intel 845GE integrated chipset, with hyperthreading support. Wibble this way.

3DVelocity takes a look at a Chaintech Apogee 7VJL KT333CE motherboard over here.

X-bit Labs puts USB 2.0 up against FireWire over here and didn't get the results they were expecting.

Never checked Neowin.net before. Won't now either: they've pulled the plug. No in-fighting, it seems - sadly - just a misunderstanding over advertising. Hmm. Have a look, if you feel the need. It was here.

AMDZone has a look at the Koolance PC2-601 and CPU-200 water cooling setup, paired up with an Athlon XP 2200+, over here.

They also posted some notes from AMD's conference call earlier this week, which you can find here.

3DCenter claims to have a detailed overview of the graphic chips from the Finnish developer Bitboys, begininng with the TriTech Pyramid3D and ending with the recognized Axe chip. Oh yeah? Bitboys huh? See if they really exist over here. Or over here via Google's translator.

Here's another look at the Sapphire Radeon 9000 Atlantis card, this time from Sudhian here.

HotHardware fiddles with Asus' V8420 GeForce 4 Ti4200 Deluxe over here.

The Canadian Overclockers chill out with the ThermalTake Blue Orb chipset cooler here. And some silver paste here.

Feel free to nail the Wibbler here.