While there will be further differences down the road as Intel's i820 mainboard core logic set debuts and as AMD's strategic core logic manufacturing partners produce their own versions of "Camino-esque" upgraded chips for the Athlon mainboards, for now the two platforms are more similar than they are different.
As we mentioned in both of the Athlon CPU reviews we've done thus far, the real world benchmark result differences between the Athlon and P3 are nearly identical currently, while the synthetic benchmark scores give the Athlon CPUs a decided advantage.
The reason for this lies in the way benchmarks work. Basically the synthetic benchmarks we utilize take advantage of a good deal of the new hardware that's designed into the Athlon CPU's architecture, including its 128KB of L1 cache and its simultaneous handling of multiple FPU and integer commands.
The real world benchmarks however are mostly based on entertainment software, which is designed to perform well even on low-end CPUs and most likely was in development long before the specs of the most current CPUs were commonly known.
This leads us to our first debate concerning the choice of an Athlon or P3 system:
As we've all seen by now, the true performance potential of the Athlon CPU is best seen in synthetic benchmark results, where at the same MHz speed it bests the Pentium III by approximately 20%.
That's a large margin to be sure, it effectively means that an Athlon 600 CPU can compete with a theoretical "P3-700" CPU if one existed right now.
But when will we actually have an in-game experience that delivers on the Athlon's upgraded hardware promise?
This is the question that most of our readers are likely asking themselves after they absorb the Athlon's benchmark results versus the P3. History gives us somewhat of a guide for answering this question, through past hardware technologies that have appeared on the market and then had to wait as the software that fully utilizes them catches up.