“Squeezing out the last bit of oomph. LIKE ITS PENTIUM 44 3.2 GHz competitor, the 2.2 GHz AthlonXP 3200+ “Barton” is supposed to be the last in its line, to be followed by a brand new replacement (in this case, Athlon 64 of course). This CPU is the peak of the three-year old 32-bit Athlon platform, the first serious competition to threaten (and often take away) the Intel performance lead – at least until the maddening “Northwood” Pentium 4 ultraquick frequency ramp-up over the past year.
XP 3200+ has everything maxed out: the L2 on-chip cache is at 512 KB, the FSB reaches 400 MHz throughput (200 MHz DDR), and the matching Nvidia Nforce2 chipset provides a dual-channel DDR400 memory subsystem to provide full FSB bandwidth to the CPU even if AGP 8X, PCI and peripherals are all continuously accessing the memory as well.”