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While the Barton 3000+ chip is no longer new, Neoseeker is releasing this article as a preamble to our upcoming Intel P4 3.2Ghz review. We hope this article will shed some insight to the Barton core 3000+ chip, the second most anticipated CPU for the first half of 2003 next to the 400MHz FSB Barton 3200+.

Barton Core

The Barton core is the successor to the 166Mhz Thoughbred "B" core. Some initial rumours claimed that AMD would introduce a 200Mhz core clock Barton, but that didn't materialize in the first verson of the Barton core found in the 3000+. Instead, the 3000+ features the same 166Mhz cock speed as the Thoroughbred "B", but doubles the L2 cache to 512KB. Intel's own P4 CPUs benefitted hugely from an L2 cache increase, and server processors have commanded high premiums thanks to their huge caches - so will the Barton 3000+ prove to be as powerful as anticipated?

That one question plagued our team as we started work on this processor: the reason being that the 3000+ name that AMD gave this new processor was even more further removed from traditional MHz based nomenclature than normal.