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The New Athlon Processor: AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel

07:00 - Monday 9 August 1999 by Thomas Pabst

1. The New Athlon Processor - AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel
2. Block Diagrams
3. 3-way Instruction Decoder - It's Not Quite The Same, Baby!
4. The Instruction Control Unit
5. The Execution Ports Continued
6. The Pipeline
7. The Pipeline Continued
8. FPU
9. mmX
10. The Second Level Cache
11. The First Level Cache
12. Athlon's EV6 Bus

13. System Bus
14. Athlon's First Chipset AMD 750 'Irongate'
15. Future Athlon Models
16. Architectural Summary
17. Benchmarking AMD's Athlon
18. Intel's Defensive Early Release Of Pentium III 600
19. The Benchmark Mix
20. The System Setup
21. The Results A - Office Application Benchmarks
22. The Results A - Office Application Benchmarks Continued
23. The Results A - Office Application Benchmarks Continued
24. The Results B - Floating Point Benchmarks

Back in October 1998 at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, the PC-world watched and listened in amazement to Dirk Meyer's first presentation of K7's or now Athlon's architecture. It was quite obvious to experts as well to most other listeners, including Intel employees, that this new AMD processor would mark a new era in the processor world, if AMD could make its promises come true. Now finally, the waiting is over and we can look at a new processor that is indeed living up to all the positive expectations that arose at the end of last year.

Later on in this article you will find that the AMD Athlon beats the Intel Pentium III in virtually any benchmark we've ran, but before we get into those benchmark numbers, I'd like to take the time and explain why the concept of Athlon is indeed more than 'just another new CPU', but a milestone in the whole processor scene.

Athlon's Micro-Architecture

The AMD Athlon is manufactured in 0.25µ technology and consists of no less than 22 million transistors.

I will try and make a comparison between the architecture of Athlon and Pentium III as far as it's possible, so that we can see why Athlon beats Pentium III in pretty much any benchmark. I'll discuss the internal units first, followed by the caches and the bus protocol, finally closing with Athlon's chipset 'Irongate'.