Introducing the AMD Athlon

After nearly two years of anticipation, hyperbole, flame wars, price wars and market changes, AMD’s new CPU design is at last released. Originally known as the K7, AMD’s latest chip has a large expectation to live up to and the survival of its parent company riding upon it. So what can we expect from this new chip. What does it bring to PC users, to tempt us away from the all conquering Intel P6 family and/or even the AMD K6 family? Well, to find out, read on.

Athlon, the background.

The AMD Athlon has been in development for nearly 2 years as AMD’s first 7th generation CPU design. This chip employs a number of design first’s from AMD, and is a very different beast from what has gone before it, be it either from AMD or Intel

AMD’s engineers approached the Athlon with what can be termed a clean sheet of paper. The Athlon is a chip which has been designed “from the ground up”, and thus does not share any legacy architechture from its K6 forebears. This has allowed AMD to rectify the deficiencies which were inherent in the K6 family, mainly the problem of a weak FPU (Floating Point Unit) when compared to equivalent Intel P6 designs.

The Athlon has also allowed AMD to wave goodbye to the Super Socket 7 motherboard format, as AMD has taken the brave move of introducing an entirely new motherboard specification, Slot A. This involves an entirely different bus protocol from Super Socket 7 and even Slot 1 and allows AMD to implement a new high performance architecture. AMD is no longer content to stay in the budget CPU market, it is now going to take on Intel at the highest possible level.

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