What is Athlon?
| PROCESSOR SPECIFICATIONS | ||
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| Manufacturer: | AMD | |
| Model: | Athlon | |
| Year: | 1999 | |
| Transistors: | 22,000,000 | |
| Microns: | 0.13µ | |
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The AMD Socket A Athlon CPU's is the PIII alternative for computer users demanding high-end performance, but without the high price tag that is usually attached to it. Without a doubt, the Socket A (Thunderbird) AMD CPU's are the best price/performance buys on the market today. While prices are relatively cheap, the performance of AMD's Athlon CPU's is hardly anything to scoff at. AMD has managed to fuse many of the consumer ideals into their high-end CPU lineup, fast, stable, and affordable. Today we'll be looking at AMD's 800 Mhz Athlon. As a quick overview, the Thunderbird series of Athlons represents AMD's answer to the 1:1 core to cache speed ratio Pentium III's (Coppermine) that have been available for quite some time now. I can recall when the Pentium III Katmai (512K cache half speed cache) CPU's were getting beaten around by the old Slot A Athlons (with 512K variable speed cache). Intel answered with their 256KB 1:1 core to cache speed Pentium III's. They were able to outpace the current Athlons at the time because the 256KB of L2 cache on the new Pentium III's allowed Intel to take the performance lead over the Athlon. Now we are at a time where the Pentium III, and Athlon are fighting on a more even ground (in regards to L2 cache speed and size). Unfortunately for Intel and the Pentium III, the Athlon does have some other obvious advantages (aside from price). And that is the fact that the Pentium III only has 32KB of L1 cache, and the Athlon has 128KB. Coupled with the fact that the Athlon has a faster and more advanced floating point unit, as well as a faster 100 Mhz DDR bus, it'll be hard for the Pentium III to keep up with it. And oh yeah, Pentium III's are realistically topping out at 933Mhz, mostly because the 1Ghz models are still relatively hard to find, and are priced well beyond the reach of most consumers. 1Ghz Athlons are readily available, and are quite affordable ($175 USD / $262 CDN). Nonetheless this is an Athlon 800Mhz review, not a 1Ghz review... but that's where overclocking shall come in. The AMD Athlon processor is among the world's most powerful engines for PC computing, and represents the industry's first seventh-generation x86 microarchitecture. The AMD Athlon processor family is designed to power the next generation in x86 computing platforms. It meets the computation-intensive requirements of cutting-edge software applications running on high-end desktop systems, workstations, and servers. All AMD Athlon processors are now produced using 0.18-micron process technology. The AMD Athlon processor provides exceptional processing power on real-world, mainstream Microsoftr Windowsr compatible software, as well as computation-intensive applications for high-end desktops. These high-end workstation applications include digital photo editing, digital video, commercial 3D modeling, image compression, soft DVD, CAD, and speech recognition . |
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