AMD Athlon - a series of microprocessors

AMD Athlon is a series of microprocessors developed and manufactured by AMD. The name comes from the English transcription of the Greek word, which can be translated as feat (in English it appears, among other things, as the keywords decathlon, heptathlon and pentathlon - respectively decathlon, heptathlon and pentathlon).

Athlon version for Slot A connector
Athlon debuted on August 21, 1999. The first version of the core, called K7 Argon, operated from 500 to 700 MHz. Later introduced, the K75 Pluto was available in 550 to 850 MHz variants, while the latest, the K75 Orion, was available from 900 to 1000 MHz. These processors used a Slot A socket that was incompatible with the Slot 1 socket used by the Pentium II and some versions of the Pentium III.

From the point of view of internal architecture, Athlon is a heavily redesigned K6 with an additional EV6 bus protocol. (first used in DEC Alpha 21264 RISC processor ). Compared to K6, the performance of floating-point computing has been significantly improved, and a large 128 KB first-level cache (L1 cache) has been added directly to the CPU core. Like the Katmai Intel Pentium II and Pentium III, the Athlon also has a 512 KB second-level cache (L2), which did not fall directly on the processor core, but was located in its housing and operated at a lower speed than the processor core.

Athlon Thunderbird
The second-generation Athlon, codenamed Thunderbird, debuted in the Slot A specification, was later replaced by the Socket A format and had a clock frequency from 650 to 1400 MHz (650 MHz - 1 GHz for slot A). The main difference from the first atlons was the cache structure. While Intel replaced the Pentium III Katmai with a much faster version of the Coppermine P-III, AMD replaced the 512 KB cache running at half the processor speed with 256 KB cache running at full speed and hosted on the same chip as the processor (as a rule of thumb: the more cache, all the better - but a faster cache increases performance even more).

Thunderbird has been AMD's most popular processor since the Am386DX-40 a decade earlier. During this time, the quality of motherboards created has improved significantly, and after the initial period when only a few models of motherboards with Socket A were available, almost all major motherboard manufacturers began to produce models that support Athlon. At that time, AMD opened a new factory in Dresden, which allowed for increased production and improved the production process of processors - like Intel, AMD began using copper connections. In October 2000, the Athlon "C" was released with an FSB frequency of 133 MHz (allowing the use of DDR266 memory), which increased the performance of this version of Athlon by about 10% compared to the first Thunderbird models. Confira aqui ofertas de bônus FairPari para novos usuários.