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By Loyd Case
design by Ethan O'Brien
Athlon.
OK, so it's not as bad as "cold dead fish on rice"; in fact,
it's right up there with "Pentium" as far as names go. Keep
rolling that word over on your tongue, because you're going to hear more
about it in the days and months to come. The Athlon, nee AMD K-7, is AMD's
seventh-generation CPU, compatible with the now-classic x86 architecture
pioneered by Intel. AMD tells us it's faster than any Intel CPU shipping.
Since we've heard this refrain on numerous occasions, we were naturally
skeptical. Unlike in the past, when AMD was somewhat reluctant to give
us hands-on experience with its CPUs, we received a complete system, with
an Athlon 600 CPU, 128MB SDRAM, and a motherboard sporting AMD's 740 chipset.
But that wasn't good enough for AMD. Earlier this week, Intel officially
released its 600MHz Pentium III, so AMD decided to rub a little salt into
the wound and delivered to us a 650MHz CPU.
Connections
At first blush, the Athlon physically resembles a Pentium II, with its
enclosed slot-style cartridge. Inside the cartridge is the CPU and the
level 2 cache. The resemblance pretty much ends there, however. The slot
architecture for the Athlon is not Intel's Slot One architecture, but
rather Slot A. Slot A was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation's
Alpha CPU (DEC is now part of Compaq). To support the new slot format,
AMD has developed a core logic chipset to support the Athlon. The test
bed we received from AMD had a motherboard with the new AMD 740 chipset.
The system bus for the Athlon - called the EV6 bus - is important because
as clock rates get higher, and as memory speeds get faster, the ability
to move data to and from memory and the L2 cache becomes critical. The
front-side bus of the Athlon runs at an impressive 200MHz - twice as fast
as the current Pentium III CPUs. The clock to main memory is asynchronous
and, in the case of our test system, runs at 100MHz - but it's capable
of higher speeds when the memory architectures and core logic to support
them hit the streets. AMD is working with key chipset providers like VIA
and ALi to ensure alternatives for end users. With VIA taking the lead
in PC133 memory, it's likely we'll see faster memory in Athlon systems
in the not-too-distant future. Companies like Asus, Gigabyte, Microstar,
and others plan on shipping Slot A motherboards.
Next: The Innards
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