MARCH 22�Advanced Micro Devices (AMD; Sunnyvale, CA; www.amd.com) has introduced its 1.33- and 1.3-GHz AMD Athlon processors. Combining the 1.33-GHz processor with double-data-rate memory, claims AMD, outperforms the Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, CA; www.intel.com) Pentium-4 processor-based platforms by as much as 40% on various benchmarks, including video encoding, image editing, and 3-D modeling and animation.
Using 0.18-µm process technology, the AMD Athlon processor is an x86-compatible, seventh-generation design that provides a 266-MHz Front Side Bus and a superpipelined, nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture for high-clock-frequency and floating-point platforms. Its cache architecture offers 384 kbytes of on-chip cache, 3-DNow technology, and 24 additional instructions for integer math calculations, data movement for Internet streaming, and DSP communications.
