Amazing Micro Devices! (AMD Athlon (Slot A))

Member Name: ia_young

Product:	AMD Athlon (Slot A)
Date:	12/10/01 (851 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap, fast, not Intel

Disadvantages: none

So there I was, considering an upgrade to my computer. Before started to purchase anything (as I was going to make it myself) I did a lot a research into what I wanted in my computer. There was one item for which I needed to do no research; this was the processor that I was going to put in this new computer. In my mind the only processor that was going to go into the new computer was a AMD Athlon, the only choice was what speed to I buy? The review will try, I hope, to be as jargonless as possible and if there is any I will try to explain (if I miss any explanations please inform me so I can update this).

** Why AMD **
Well the major difference between AMD and Intel is the pricing of their processors. A quick browse on the internet and you find that AMDs top of the range Athlon processor costs you £175 where as Intels top of the range Pentium 4 costs you £540 (source www.novtech.co.uk 12/10/2001). I wasn't going to get the latest chip so I eventually paid around the £110 mark, which for what I got I thought, was very reasonable. The other thing is that AMD Processors have been tested and have consistently outperformed their Intel rivals.

** What Athlon Chips are Available? **
There are many variations available to the consumer, here is an overview of the Athlon Processors that can be purchased:

• AMD Athlon™ processor with a 266MHz front-side bus supporting PC2100 DDR memory technology is available at 1.4, 1.33, 1.2, 1.13, and 1.0GHz.

• AMD Athlon™ processor with 200MHz front-side bus supporting PC1600 DDR memory technology is available at 1400 (1.4GHz) 1300, 1200, 1100, and 1000MHz .

Front-side Bus - this is the way in which the processor communicates with the rest of the computer. The faster the Bus then the faster the computer. (I hope this explanation is sufficient, if I have missed anything please let me know).

DDR - stands for Double Data Rate, which basically mea
ns that the speeds of the processor are double the PC100 and PC133 standards (faster basically!). For a more detailed explanation of this, if you are interested check out the AMD website.

Generally the processors with the 266 MHz front-side bus are a little more expensive, but only to the tune of £1 (not much if you ask me for a little extra performance). The only thing is with this is that you have to make sure that the motherboard that your processor is plugged into supports this, if it does not then you will not benefit from these speeds.

** Installing **
What can I say about this, apart from it is very easy (well for me). I wouldn't recommend any installing a new processor unless they are confident with what they are doing. The processor is quite an expensive bit of kit to just go play around until the chip is installed.

The interface with the motherboard is a Socket A connection, this is very similar to that of the old Pentium series. It is just the chip with its connection pins in the bottom, this fits into the housing on the motherboard, and it can only go in one way, and is then locked in place. The only thing that may be tricky is the fitting of the heat sink (a device to help cool the processor down). But this too is that challenging.

** Using **
After I had set-up this new computer I could see the difference all this new kit had made to the speed of the computer. The computer no longer lagged when loading some bits of software; these just loaded very quickly (just what I wanted to see). Since then I have got back into gaming a little as this new computer could run the game that I wanted at reasonable speed with no jerky movement and no waiting around while the processor to catch up. I have had no problems with this new processor; it has been very stable.

** My Thoughts **
AMD used to be thought of as the poor man's Intel, but in recent years their processors have been gaining a new i
mage and actually out perform Intel's latest Pentium 4 Processors. I would recommend anyone to look for a computer with an AMD Processor in it as for one it will be a lot cheaper than the Intel rival, which most probably out performing it. All I can hope is that AMD keep up their good work and provide an alternative to Intel at an affordable price.

For those interested in some more specific detailed about the processor these can be found on the AMD website, www.amd.com. Alternatively, the following are some products features as found on the AMD website.


** Features (source www.amd.com) **

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, piEnhanced 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
• pelined integer units
• Three out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined address calculation units
• 72-entry instruction control unit
• Advanced dynamic branch prediction

266MHz or 200MHz AMD Athlon™ processor system bus enables leading-edge system bandwidth for data movement-intensive applications .
• Source synchronous clo
cking (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

Summary: