First Benchmarks of Hammer Prototype

Test Hardware

Maybe AMD has beaten the Hammer drum a bit too loud at Computex and has raised great expectations. The Texas-based company may propably not be too happy about these early benchmark results. But we still decided to publish them. On the one hand we were allowed to use the system a whole hour on our own and could equip it with the test components. Neither while configurating the system nor while testing it any problems whatsoever emerged. The prototype hardware was running absolutely steadily.

On the other hand, AMD itself has been making a fuss about the new CPU for a whole year - at least if the Hammer should be launched by December. For customers it will be a completely new platform and therefore the purchase decision should be well considered. But it is much too early to make a decision by now because the tested devices were mere prototypes like those engineers use for developing components.

The graphics card we used was a GeForce3 with Detonator driver XP 28.32. We used 256 Mbytes DDR333 memory. The Timing was conservative 2.5-3-3 clocks, for all other BIOS issues we used Default settings. Processors we compared with the system have been tested in a configuration comparable with our current test configuration.