Thats absolutely untrue. The sempron is exactly identical to an AthlonXP , using the very same Thoroughbred cores as Chaos mentioned.
The only difference being the Semprons are “over-rated” literally. Their clock speeds are much lower than an equivalent rating Athlon XP but FSB has been bumped up to 333Mhz, however the increase in FSB does not make up for the lower clock speeds and it loses out to the Athlon XP in all counts.
A Sempron 2400+ would always perform lower than an Athlon XP 2400+. And same holds good for the rest of the models.
The reason for the new “optimistic” rating for the Semprons is easy.
AMD no longer needed the Athlon XPs to compete versus the Pentium4s. So they simply renamed the Athlon XPs to Semprons, increased the ratings and targetted it versus the much weaker Celerons.
All the above applies to Socket A Semprons alone.
Socket 754 Semprons are in a different league altogether as they’re based completely on the Athlon64 architecture with just certain features disabled.
Sorry Darky, for making use of your thread this way
Perhaps it may get a higher Rating
Sorry Guyz, for putting up wrong info. , actually this reasoning holds true, when you compare Winchester a64 running at lower clock speeds with equivalent Newcastle a64 running at higher clock speeds. Winchester is said to have a more optimized architecture. So i thought it may as well apply to Sempron series, but i guess they have started to give it increased ratings as its targeted at Celerons.
BTW if you don’t overclock, Sempron s754 performance is similar to Socket A Sempron and here’s is the benchmarking article to confirm it
