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Well, sadly, yes. Infact they'd lost it with the release of Canterwood and the new 'C' Pentium 4's. However, it's not all doom and gloom. At Hexus, and personally myself, we like to preach the mantra of you buy what fits your needs. Is your processing bent all floating point power or are you a SETI freak? Kerching, XP3200+ or something similar will make your eyes light up.
The interesting thing for me with this processor launch is that it indicates the performance level of 2 pretty much unrelated AMD setups that aren't XP3200+. Firstly, the advent of lower clocked Athlon XP's with the overclocking headroom to get right up here means that XP3200+ at 2.2GHz (11 x 200) on a 200MHz front side bus is where your freshly bought XP1700+ JUIHB is going to be at 11.5 x 200 (mind that extra cache remember). 2.3GHz is a not unreasonable clock to obtain these days. AMD wont like me for saying that very much but even they'll admit that the low end demand makes more bank for them than these high end models, even if margins are better up here in the performance clouds.
The second setup that this XP3200+ makes me excited about is Opteron and furthermore, Athlon64. Remember that Opteron/Athlon64 (K8) is this generation of Athlon (K7) with a couple more pipeline stages, an integrated memory controller, more cache memory and 64-bit extensions to the x86 ISA.
You can broadly extrapolate performance from todays XP3200+ marker and have a faint hint at what AMD64 performance will be like on the desktop in the fall. NVIDIA will be around to provide the support too and I'm a big fan of nForce2.
As a here-and-now product, XP3200+ doesn't do too much for me unless I'm thinking about generic desktop performance and floating point performance. Canterwood and the new 'C' P4's are just too strong otherwise.
Performance is massive, don't forget that. It's not slow, it's just hard to enthuse in terms of consumer desktop performance too much when Intel is winking at you suggestively from the other corner of the room wearing a low cut 800MHz front side bus top and a short Canterwood or Springdale skirt.
Look at the performance, then go out and buy an XP1700+ or XP1800+ and make an XP3200+ for lots less money. These things are quick.
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