AMD Athlon 1.33

Author : Martyn Date : 2nd October 2001

3DVelocity would like to thank AMD UK and especially Theresa Zimmer for their help and courtesy in providing this CPU for review.

 

 

Part One: I Remember When...

It wasn't so long ago I was scheming and begging for enough money to purchase the latest Pentium 2 chip (A 400mhz version at the time I recall). My how things have changed in the recent years; AMD, forever on the edge of developing into a true competitor for Intel have gone from strength to strength. The K6-2 chip brought AMD back into the attention of the media thanks to its increased budget performance via '3DNow!' and higher cache, yet it felt truly that; budget and not a genuine alternative to the early P2's and 3's. The Athlon thrust AMD into the driving seat thanks to its amazing performance and lower price. AMD chips began to seem on par with the latest Pentiums and soon the few in the know realized the Athlon CPU eclipsed Intel solutions by quite a margin. If more reinforcement was needed, AMD even managed to beat Intel to the coveted 1GHZ frequency. With prices falling all the time as Intel tried to keep up with the better performing Athlons and newly introduced Duron budget CPU's, consumers could only be thankful that the days of staring in amazement at the price of the latest CPU were, for now, over.

We have been vocal of our support for both proccesing alternatives here at 3DVelocity, so to start our CPU reviews let's look at the 1.33Ghz Athlon from AMD. Soon we will review the top clock speed too but with the difference in speed and price in mind, let's start with this version. The CPU is using the 266DDR FSB.

 

Part Two: A Look At The Specifications

(Information contained in Part Two is quoted from AMD's website. For a more detailed look please visit AMD here.)

 

Key architectural features of the AMD Athlon™ processor include:

The industry's first nine-issue superpipelined, superscalar x86 processor microarchitecture designed for high clock frequencies:

Multiple parallel x86 instruction decoders
Three out-of-order, superscalar, fully pipelined floating point execution units, which execute x87 (floating point), MMX™ and 3DNow!™ instructions
Three out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined integer units
Three out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined address calculation units
72-entry instruction control unit
Advanced dynamic branch prediction

Enhanced 3DNow! technology for leading-edge 3D performance

21 original 3DNow! instructions-the first technology enabling superscalar SIMD
19 additional instructions to enable improved integer math calculations for speech or video encoding and improved data movement for Internet plug-ins and other streaming applications
5 DSP instructions to improve soft modem, soft ADSL, Dolby Digital surround sound, and MP3 applications
Compatible with Windows® 98, Windows 95, and Windows NT® 4.x without software patches

266MHz or 200MHz AMD Athlon™ processor system bus enables leading-edge system bandwidth for data movement-intensive applications

Source synchronous clocking (clock forwarding) technology
Support for 8-bit ECC for data bus integrity
Peak data rate of 1.6 to 2.1GB/s (depending on processor bus speed)
Multiprocessing support: point-to-point topology, with number of processors in SMP systems determined by chipset implementation
Support for 24 outstanding transactions per processor

The AMD Athlon processor with performance-enhancing cache memory features 128K of L1 cache and 256K of integrated, on-chip L2 cache for a total of 384K full speed, on-chip cache
Socket A infrastructure designs are based on high-performance platforms and are supported by a full line of optimized infrastructure solutions (chipsets, motherboards, BIOS)

Available in Pin Grid Array (PGA) for mounting in a socketed infrastructure
Electrical interface compatible with 266MHz and 200MHz AMD Athlon system buses, based on Alpha EV6™ bus protocol

Die size: approximately 37 million transistors on 120 mm2 die on 0.18-micron process technology
Manufactured using AMD's state-of-the-art 0.18-micron process technology at AMD's Fab 25 and Fab 30 wafer fabrication facilities

Page Two

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