Product Reviews

The latest and greatest hardware always gets lots of attention. Ideally we'd all buy these products, but the prices are always prohibitive. There's plenty of room, therefore, for a budget range of processors, such as AMD's new Sempron.

As the name suggests, the Sempron is AMD's answer to Intel's Celeron brand. It would appear to be a marketing exercise, though, as the Sempron is very similar in architecture to the original Athlon XP.

In fact, it uses the same Socket A motherboard as the XP, although most will need a BIOS update to recognise the processor correctly. The exception to this is the Sempron 3100+, which uses the same Socket 754 motherboards as the Athlon 64 series. The Sempron is a 32-bit processor, not a 64-bit one, but this makes little difference at the moment as there is no AMD64 version of Windows yet.

The 2800+ is the next model down from the top-end 3100+. The Sempron is also available in 2400+, 2500+ and 2600+ models. Mobile versions

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of the product will also be available.

The main thing about the Sempron range is the price. The 2800+ model costs £77 including VAT, which is £7 cheaper than a 2.8GHz Celeron. This makes it a difficult choice, and most decisions will probably come down to the cost of the motherboard. If you're upgrading your processor, the motherboard will affect your decision.

A Sempron 2800+ has 256KB of L2 cache and runs with a Frontside Bus (FSB) speed of 333MHz. An Athlon XP 2800+ has 512KB of cache and a 333MHz FSB.

We tested the Systemax Inspire 7512, which uses the Sempron 2800+ processor. It scored 116 in SYSmark2004 and 3,077 in PCMark04. Both scores show that the 2800+ is a capable processor for everyday PC tasks. The scores aren't far off what we'd expect from an Athlon XP.

As the Athlon XP 2800+ costs just £7 more than the Sempron, you're probably wondering why you'd bother with this processor. In short, you wouldn't. AMD isn't expecting these processors to fly off the retail shelves and we'd suggest spending the extra to buy an Athlon XP instead.

However, AMD has said that the Sempron will be a lot cheaper for system builders, bringing down the price of budget PCs. Even so, if you're looking for a new PC it's probably worth asking how much extra it would cost to have an XP processor instead.

The Sempron isn't all that exciting a release and is certainly not one for people who want to build their own PCs. If, however, it can lower the price of complete systems it will be a worthy competitor to the Celeron.