16th Annual Technical Excellence Awards?PC Magazine
Just picked up the December edition of PC magazine. Although many here are aware of the many awards the Athlon has achieved in its short, but incredibly impressive, lifespan to date of,as unbelievable as it may sounds, 5 months, thought this one deserved special attention:
Source: 16th Annual Technical Excellence Awards
December issue of PC Magazine
AMD Athlon
Components Award
?Just when we thought Intel had a lock on the high end of the x86-compatible marketplace, in came AMD with its formidable AMD Athlon chip. A talented design team led by Dirk Meyer created this processor, based on an entirely new core. Like the Pentium II and the Pentium III, the Athlon is mounted in a module with separate SRAM chips for the L2 cache, and it has a special bus that connects the processor to the L2 cache chips. As with Intel?s current chips, the L2 cache has a size of 512K, and the interface runs at half the processor?s clock speed.
The Athlon?s design has several advantages over the Pentium III. The Athlon has four times the L1 cache of the Pentium III, can execute more RISC-like internal instructions per cycle, and can often decode more x86 instructions at a time. AMD?s chip even beats the Pentium III in floating-point processing by a substantial margin. The Athlon uses a 200 MHz system bus, based on Alpha 21264 bus, providing headroom for faster memory subsystems. Eventually it may be used for everything from portables to multiprocessor units. For now, it?s the chip that battles Intel for top PC performance.? |
