AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

Under SYSMark 2000 we can finally start to see a decent increase in performance courtesy of the Thunderbird's full speed on-die L2 cache. One of the many factors that was penalizing the Thunderbird under SYSMark 2000 was the fact that its L2 cache was always running at or below 350MHz and one of the known traits of the benchmark is that it has a strong bias towards a fast memory subsystem and a fast L2 cache as well.

Simply by moving the L2 cache on-die and increasing its clock speed the Thunderbird manages to pull away with a 10% improvement in performance under SYSMark 2000. While this doesn't put the Thunderbird at the very top of the chart it places the CPU very close to the Pentium III 1GHz (820) forerunner which is considerably more expensive.

This 10% performance improvement is on the lower end of what we were told by AMD to expect from the Thunderbird seemingly ages ago, a 10 - 20% improvement in performance was what we could expect from the move to an on-die L2 cache running at clock speed.