About Central Processors

About AMD

The AMD K7, or Athlon processor as it will now be referred to as, is nothing like the 5x86, K5, and K6 lines of processors. For the first time in history, AMD has released a processor that beats Intel in clock speed. The fastest Intel processor at the time of Athlon release was 550MHz with the Pentium 3, while fastest Athlon was 600Mhz. It also beats it in performance at the same clock speed. It is even said to perform better than the Pentium 3 XEON. The K7 has 512KB of Half speed L2 Cache, while the XEON had 512KB of FULL Speed L2 Cache, both tested were at 550Mhz. The preformance clock for clock of the Athlon and Pentium iii seems to decrease when talking in terms of 750Mhz plus. That is because the L2 cache speed of the Athlon drops from 50% of the core, to 40% of the core. At 900Mhz, that drops to 33%. Meanwhile, the Pentium iii Coppermine, at those same clock speeds, has an advanced 256KB of ondie, L2 Cache

So how did they come up with the name Athlon? AMD wanted to emphasize that the new product represents a champion of competition and delivers capabilities and performance significantly better than the existing AMD-K6 processor family. Sounds exactly like what Intel did with the Pentium chip. Intel did it because they couldn't copyright a number, and they didn't want other companies making chips with the same name as theirs, but with lesser performance.

Athlon Technical Specifications:

Super-pipelined, nine-issue superscalar micro-architecture optimized for high clock frequency

Industry first, fully pipelined, superscalar floating point unit for x86 platforms

128KB of on-chip level-one (L1) cache

Programmable, high-performance backside L2 cache interface which can feature 512KB to 8MB of onboard running from 50% - 33% of core speed (Slot A)

Advanced, exclusive 256KB - 2MB ondie L2 cache running at 100% of core speed.

Enhanced 3DNow! technology

Alpha "Slot/Socket A" Interface using ALPHA Frontside Bus Protocol

There are many reasons the Athlon performs so well. First is because of it's FPU It has three, independent FPU units, that can do the same thing at the same time. As for the Pentium III CPU, if one of it's pipelines need to do an action, all other pipelines (processing pipes) wanting to to the same thing must stop and wait for it to get done. This makes the Athlon truly a Seventh Generation Processor. Another reason is because of it's L2 cache. On all of the older Slot A Athlons, the L2 cache toped out at 350Mhz. When the core reached 750Mhz, AMD had to bring the L2 cache down to 40% of the processing core to fulfill the 350MHz maximum rating. Then again at 900Mhz, they had to drop the L2 down to 33% of the core. This made the 1GHz AMD Athlon Processor perform much worse than it's Pentium iii counterpart, once again putting Intel on top, with the fastest x86 chip available to the public. Recently, AMD announced the second generation of it's AMD Athlon Processor. The "Thunderbird" as it was codenamed, moved the L2 cache on the core, providing a 100% Core/L2 ratio. It also decreased the size by 50%, from 512KB, to 256KB. AMD also changed it's Athlon's cache, from 2-way set associative, to 16-way set associative, a move that should increase the hit rate, meaning the core should need to go to the slower system memory for information less.

The Athlon is produced using .18micron Aluminum technology in the Fab25 Plant at Austin Texas, while .18 Copper technology is being used at Fab30 in Dresden, Germany

Intell Processors:

First, we must get something straight, from the beginning. Although this chip was codenamed the Coppermine, there is no copper in it what so ever. What the Coppermine name means, is that it’s based on the new .18-micron core, meaning the transistors are .18 microns apart. Smaller distance between the transistors means the chip can run faster, cooler, and lower temperatures. All previous Intel processors, from the Pentium II to the Pentium III 600, use .25-micron technology. Intel first used .18-micron technology in the Mobile Pentium II 400MHz Processor. That experience of using .18u on a processor that didn’t demand as much gave Intel the experience they needed to dive right into making their desktop processor using .18u.
The New Pentium III “E” now uses two types of packages, as once did the Celeron. At first, most Pentium III “E” Processors will be made using SECC-2, which all-previous Pentium III processors have. Some will start using the Flip Chip design, which is what the Celeron now uses. Flip Chip design allows for better core cooling, by moving the core of the CPU to the top of the Processor chip, which touches the Heat-sink and fan directly. Flip Chip design also calls for the processor to be plugged into a Socket-370 board, which are cheaper to make, both in terms of the processor and motherboard, than Slot 1 processor. Right now, only the Pentium III 500E, and Pentium III 550E will be available in Flip Chip Socket 370 form, but sometime in the year 2000, all Pentium III “E” processor will be available in Flip Chip form as Intel starts to forget about Slot 1 and SECC-2.

Another new thing about the Pentium III “E” is its usage of 256KB of on-die L2 Cache. The cache is onboard, like that of the Celeron processor, but there is a slight difference. The “road” in which data travels to the core of the CPU has been quadrupled, along with the actual size of the L2 cache being doubled. The road has been quadrupled from 64 bits of the Celeron to 256 bits to the Pentium III “E”. The L2 Cache of the Pentium III “E” is also doubled from 128KB of the Celeron to 256KB. The Pentium III “E” Processor still has 32KB of L1 Cache, which all Intel Processor have had since the days of the Pentium MMX.

The Pentium III “E” also now runs on the 133.3MHz system bus, a 33% raise from the 100Mhz bus. That means, the multiplier is set down to work with the higher bus, meaning that overclocking will be easier. The 133.3Mhz bus also means that the processor can now handle 1.06GB of data per second [(64bit bus * 133.3Mhz)/8bits = 1086MB = 1.06GB] from the rest of the system, instead of the 800MB/sec the previous Pentium III Processors have had from the 100Mhz bus.

Below is a table that will clarify what Pentium III "E" Processors are currently available. Intell continually upgrades as you can see!

Processor	L2 Speed	L2 Size	Bus Speed


Pentium 4
Pentium III 1 Gig
Pentium III 933	933MHz	256KB
Pentium III 866	866MHz	256KB
Pentium III 800	800MHz	256KB
Pentium III 733	733MHz	256KB	133MHz
Pentium III 667	667MHz	256KB	133MHz
Pentium III 650	650MHz	256KB	100MHz
Pentium III 600EB	600MHz	256KB	133MHz
Pentium III 600E	600MHz	256KB	100MHz
Pentium III 600B	300MHz	512KB	133MHz
Pentium III 550E	550MHz	256KB	100MHz
Pentium III 550	275MHz	512KB	100MHz
Pentium III 533	533MHz	256KB	133MHz
Pentium III 500E	500MHz	256KB	100MHz
Pentium III 500	250MHz	512KB	100MHz