THE AMD ATHLON PROCESSOR
Last updated: 11/22/99
 The
Athlon has a 200 Mhz System bus. The block diagram to the right
shows the Athlon with AMD's 750 chipset consisting of the 751 Northbridge
System Controller and 756 Southbridge Peripheral bus controller. Remember,
the cache' is inside the CPU. The System Bus goes between the processor
and the Northbridge. The Northbridge interfaces to the three additional
buses: the memory bus to main memory (100 Mhz, PC-100), the AGP bus going
to the AGP graphics slot (66 Mhz, AGP 2X), and the PCI bus (33 Mhz). The
Southbridge hangs off the PCI bus. The System Bus or Front Side Bus
(FSB) is the data expressway or funnel which carries all of the data to
and from the CPU from the other buses via the Northbridge. The System
Bus consists of three independent, synchronously-clocked 200 Mhz
high-speed channels:
-
13-pin processor request channel
-
13-pin system probe channel
-
72-pin data transfer channel (8-bit
ECC)
The bus is capable of transferring peak data
rates of 1.6 Bytes per second and 64-Bytre Burst data transfers. In
short, the Athlon has a 200 Mhz System Bus between it and the Northbridge
chip.
 The
Athlon has Slot A infrastructure design. The Athlon processor
plugs into a Slot A socket which looks like, but is not electronically
the same as an Intel Slot 1 socket. The Athlon has an electrical
interface compatible with 200-MHz AMD Athlon system bus, which is based
on DEC's (Compaq) Alpha EV6 bus protocol. Do
not plug this CPU into a Slot 1 motherboard. However,
the Athlon can use the same mechanical components (heat sinks, fans, etc.)
as the Intel Slot 1 CPUs. In short, the Athlon uses a Slot A motherboard
and can use Slot 1 heat-sink/CPU fans.
SUMMARY
-
The Athlon is the first seventh generation
X86 processor.
-
X86 instructions are decoded into Athlon
instructions.
-
The Instruction Control Unit is a managed
buffer between the decoders and schedulers.
-
Two execution schedulers manage the
execution pipelines.
-
There are nine independent execution
pipelines. Three of them are floating point units.
-
The Athlon implements Enhanced 3DNow!™
with SMID.
-
The Athlon has advanced branch prediction
logic
-
128 Kbytes of L1 and 512 KBytes of
L2 cache' are built-in.
-
There is a 200 Mhz System Bus between
the CPU and the Northbridge chip.
-
The Athlon uses a Slot A motherboard
and can use Slot 1 heat-sink/CPU fans.
BOTTOM LINE
The
Athlon is the fastest X86 CPU I've ever seen!
Larry
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