Neowin.net

Well after digging around a bit, it appears that this "Prototype" was indeed a fake (or most likely, the original poster has not owned up to it yet) The guys over at Deadbodies appear to of been able to prove by doing the math that the image is doctered. We at Neowin were reeled in, so we admit it, look at the post and have a laugh on us.

Thanks to AMDLojik and M3DZone for this news.

AMD, Inc. sent out the FIRST of its Palomino 3000+ Prototypes to various resellers across North America, recently, and being the tactful being I am, yours truly managed to take a peak (and scan the CPU at my workstation when no one was looking) at the new, excessively powerful chip that is every hardcore gamer's wildest dream, and from the looks of things, Intel's worst nightmare.

Intel thought pretty highly of itself when it released the Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz recently, which beat the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ by a hairline margin in various benchmarks. Funny, considering the 2000+ only runs at a clock speed of 1.67GHz. Intel's a sneaky bunch, they are. Cheating customers out of performance by having a disgustingly low Operations per Cycle rate on the P4, yet boasting an incredible 2.2GHz.

Pics inside of this Prototype CPU

News source: M3DZone

It seems Intel is about to run out of steam very quickly.

My place of work (name being with-held for obvious reasons), which deals in service and wholesale/retail sales, acquired a chip from AMD, as they were one of many picked to test the chip. Along with the chip came a specially designed XP motherboard, exclusively produced for the XP 3000+ Prototype.

There is something to be said for the color blue; dark, futuristic... if you want to go there, sexy even. AMD makes no mistake with this one, as soon as you look at the chip; you know you're gazing at pure processing power.

Clearly labelled on the core are, of course, "AMD Athlon™", and at the bottom, the "Palomino 3000+ PROTOTYPE" marking. Great thing about AMD is this; each time you buy a new processor, you generally don't have to buy a new motherboard. While normally that'd be the case, because this chip is so new, current motherboards do not have the BIOS updates to handle such a powerful specimen. AMD was nice enough to drop in a specially designed prototype motherboard for us to try it out. However, they didn't remember to send us a fan. No worries, we used one that we had in stock, the ThermalTake DragonOrb 1 running at 7000RPM. Applied some Arctic Silver II, popped the chip in, put the fan on, and booted up the machine.

Special thanks to Stu and his digital camera for grabbing this picture of the POST.



Pretty impressive stuff, as you can see. Athlon(tm) XP 3000+ brought a tear to my eye... just so beautiful.... 2666MHz is friggin' incredible (Doing the math, 133x20 is only 2660. The exact number is around 20.045). Intel, eat your heart out. Note the "XP-266/A AMD Chipset" at the top, denoting the exclusive AMD motherboard used for beta testing.

Thanks to M3DZone for these pictures.