Athlon series is the replacement of the K6 microprocessor previous series designed by NexGen Corporation. The processor completely new and designed not use the socket-7 as AMD K6 that had circulated earlier and use the same cartridge design as Intel Pentium II / III Slot-1 242-pin, the pin placements are different positions with Intel, so no pin -compatible with the Intel processors. As a result of which is carried by the cartridge design is that the Level-2 cache which is in the cartridge has a divider so that the speed is not running the same CPU speed. Cache Level-2 minimal owned by the AMD Athlon processor is 512 KB and the maximum is 8192 KB (8MB). Because of the new architectural design of the AMD Athlon, using DEC EV6 bus, pins from the slot-A differentiated from slot-1's Intel. The people who will assume somewhat skeptical that the AMD Athlon is a DEC Alpha with the addition of x86 and MMX instructions.
This processor is a come-back action AMD to industrial markets high-end microprocessors and AMD want to shift as the market leader Intel's microprocessor industry. Architecturally, this processor has an architecture similar to the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Alpha 21,164 and 21,264, the two processors 64-bit RISC. Some designs are taken from the DEC EV-6 of which are three integer 10-stage pipeline, floating point and three 9-stage pipeline, plus three address generators (one per integer pipeline) which operate independently with other execution units. Additional features that differ from the Alpha design is the additional two units of instruction for the 3DNow! and two for the MMX instructions which are in floating point pipeline. 3DNow! is inserted into the AMD Athlon processor has been improved and expanded by adding 24 additional instructions to improve integer arithmetic calculations. When compared with the K6 processor, the performance generated by the Athlon is far different, especially for the performance of floating point and integer. Can even surpass Intel Pentium III Katmai and can only be approached by the Pentium III Coppermine.
L1 cache design is owned Athlon processor is also similar to the DEC Alpha, which also shared a 128 KB. This resulted in Athlon processors have a new record: the first x86 processor with L1 cache greatest. Like a modern processor, L1 cache divided equally: 64 KB of data cache and 64 KB for instruction cache. However, for L2 cache which has not so special because it is located in the cartridge, not the chip, which causes the higher velocity, is equal to the design of the Pentium II and Pentium III Katmai. Cartridge design does have a weakness in the L2 cache divider, so the speed is not the same L2 cache processor speed. By using the divider 1 / 3, 1 / 2, and 2 / 5 from clock speed, L2 cache processor will experience a cache-miss ratio is greater. However, the width L2 cache bus bandwidth was increased to a 64-bit. As DEC Alpha processor, which mengeksklusifkan L1 cache, then this also applies to the Athlon. L1 cache that is exclusive to cause the information contained in the L1 is not copied to the L2 cache as well as the Pentium Pro and its derivatives (Pentium III and Pentium 4) and to facilitate transfer between them, AMD's implementation of a buffer "victim".
Another key feature that is owned by the Athlon system bus architecture of the new S2K named, which is derived directly from the system bus DEC EV6 processor. S2K is normally run at a speed of 100 MHz and can be increased up to 400 MHz speed. Although running at a speed of 100 MHz, S2K can transfer data twice in one clock when the curve is high and low that will increase the throughput to double that. This kind of technology known as DDR, or Double Data Rate. However, only applies in the S2K bus system, because the address bus is not affected and consequently address bus only has the same speed with the FSB.
In addition to these features, processor AMD Athlon processor can also be used for multi-processor systems, as well as the sixth generation of Intel processors, P6. Actually, multi-processor architecture is already owned by the AMD K6 processor, but there was still no chipset that supports it. So, fans of AMD's dream or the technicians who are hungry for computational performance using multi-processor architecture which is owned by AMD K6 processor remains a dream. This does not happen on AMD Athlon processors. By using the AMD 750MP chipset (Iron-gate) and AMD to make 760MPX dream machine with two AMD Athlon processors it can be realized. For that, AMD made two types of processors: Single-processor, with a AMD Athlon, and Multi-processor, with a AMD Athlon Professional. Both are equally equipped with similar technology with different support for multi-processor, although many overclockers that can run on regular AMD Athlon motherboard with two processors by changing a few bridges on the processor core.
AMD Athlon / Athlon Professional is built on the wafer 250 nanometers and 180 nanometers. For that, AMD named processors built on the 250-nanometer wafers with C code, and built on the 180-nanometer wafers with code A.
If compared, this processor is intended to compete with Intel Pentium II Xeon / Pentium III Xeon, with all the reliability they have. Athlon win on the system bus architecture, while the Xeon wins at Level-2 cache running at full speed (full-core speed) even though he was in the cartridge. Pentium III and Pentium II, let alone opponents can not match the power of Athlon processors. Only the Pentium III Coppermine alone can mengunggulinya (although the difference is very little).
Processor speed is stuck at a speed of 1000 MHz. Still, AMD managed to reach the psychological barrier: limit through 1000 MHz (1 GHz) three days earlier before Intel launched the Pentium III Coppermine 1 GHz. This resulted in AMD deserve the predicate "Processor of the Year" in 2000, which since 1993 until the year 1999 was always dominated by Intel processors can be approached without AMD.
