What's a Palomino

[Mike Emerson]

My mainboard has jumpers for either
(a)Athlon/Duron, or (b) Palomino.
What's a Palomino??? (My cpu is Athlon 1600XP)
Thanks
Mike Emerson

[harry smit]

I am not a specialist but Palomino is a name of the processor's core.
The Duron is built on Morgan core.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q...ahertz-01.html

...Motherboards that lack the BIOS-support for 'Morgan' will either not boot at all or they will not run the new processor properly or at least not report SSE-support (in e.g. WCPU or SiSoft's Sandra). The same is actually valid for the (still upcoming) Athlon 4 processor (Palomino-core) for desktop computers, which comes with the same enhancement features. Once a motherboard is able to handle 'Morgan' it should also work with 'Palomino' and vice versa. The situation is a good test for the quality of your motherboard maker, because only the good ones supply BIOS-updates on time, the lame ones don't. Asus is probably the best motherboard maker in regards to BIOS updates, but it still continues to overclock each and every processor by a fraction of a MHz to be able to win benchmark competitions....

Harry

[oasisman]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by Mike Emerson:
My mainboard has jumpers for either
(a)Athlon/Duron, or (b) Palomino.
What's a Palomino??? (My cpu is Athlon 1600XP)
Thanks
Mike Emerson<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think that the Athlon XP and MP processors use the Palomino core, where as the Duron is the budget low end chip (Still bloody good though) that uses the Morgan core.

Cheers. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[harry smit]

Oasisman,

The Athlon XP is indeed based on the Palomino core.
Story as sourced again from www.tomshardware.com:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q...hlonxp-01.html

First and foremost, the name 'AthlonXP' is not just following the current trend to call everything after Microsoft's new operating system WindowsXP (like e.g. NVIDIA's new originally named driver set 'DetonatorXP'), but the 'XP' that is supposed to hype the new 'experience' you might have with WindowsXP, is supposed to suggest the 'extreme performance' of AthlonXP.

New Features

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.

I'll list Palomino's added features over Thunderbird once more:

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'.
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.
Implementation of a thermal diode to monitor processor temperature

[Allen Hallada]

And next up:

Thoroughbred based on the .13micron core secretly named "Clawhammer"

Stick around for more WWF folks as the "AMD Clawhammer" challenges the almighty "Intel Northwoods" in the 2Ghz+ weight class.

Allen [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]