Memory performance

Overclocked or not, the Athlon XP is getting long in the tooth, and it especially shows in the area of memory bandwidth. The XP-M comes in right where we'd expect, tied with the XP 3200+ (which shares its 400MHz bus speed) and beating only the XP 3000+ with its 333MHZ front-side bus. The XP chips just don't have the juice to compete with 800MHz front-side busses and on-die memory controllers.

The 2.4GHz XP-M outpaces all of the AMD chips by a good margin, at least until the matrix sizes get outside its 512KB L2 cache. At larger matrix sizes, however, the Hammer chips' 1MB L2 cache and on-die memory controller lay down a beating on the XP-M.

A slight jump in clock speed over the XP 3200+ gives the XP-M a slight edge in memory access latency, putting it ahead of the 3.4GHz EE and the 2.8GHz Prescott as well. Still, things are pretty bunched up here in the middle of the graph, and the Hammer systems just embarrass everything.