Tweak3D heeft een interessant artikel in elkaar gedraaid over het hoe en wat van de AMD Athlon. Alle specificaties worden nageplozen en uitgelegd in dit zeer informatieve en duidelijke artikel. Er wordt veel aandacht besteed aan de verschillen tussen de AMD Athlon en de P3, zoals in dit stukje over de 200MHz bus van de Athlon:
AMD licensed architectural technology from Digital to incorporate it into its Athlon processor. Called the EV6 Bus, this technology will take the Athlon well above what Intel is currently capable of. Originally, the technology was designed for Digital's Alpha 21264 RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processor.
The EV6 bus architecture gives the Athlon more I/O bandwidth than normal desktop PCs currently stuffed with "Intel Inside." As a side effect though, the use of the same architecture will theoretically let AMD Slot A motherboards use the Alpha 21264. Unfortunately, this will mean that it is totally incompatible with your Slot 1 processors. Intel and AMD will not sleep together this time around.
The Athlon's incredible bus bandwidth doesn't stop with 200MHz default speed. It also has a separate independent backside bus for the external L2 cache, just like a Pentium 2/III/Celeron. Unfortunately, like we said before, this hampers the chances of your overclocking success. Boo.But take it from us, the tradeoff is well worth it. At 200MHz, the bus's I/O throughput brings in 1.6GB/sec, which is double the capacity of Intel's GTL+ (Gunning Transceiver Logic) architecture - the one inside the Pentium 2/III/Celeron. Future Athlons (the Ultras) could double that bandwidth again by driving the frequency up to 400MHz. In comparison, Intel's will be running at 133MHz.