CNN heeft een artikeltje over de AMD Athlon in elkaar gedraaid. Verwacht geen opwindende info, je zult er niets in vinden wat we nog niet weten...
AMD's processors have always done well in integer performance, which is important for common business tasks, but have lagged in floating-point performance, which counts most in elaborate financial models, engineering, and games. The K7 claims superior integer performance and even better floating point, with three floating-point units on board to the Pentium III's two. In addition, the K7 is loaded with multimedia instructions. Gamers take note: AMD promises that optimized drivers will be available at launch from NVidia, 3dfx, and Matrox, with S3 and ATI drivers coming soon.When the K7's on-chip 128KB L1 cache becomes too small, the K7 will call on the 200-MHz EV6 bus developed for Digital's Alpha processors. Unlike the Pentium III, the EV6 bus has a "source-synchronous" design. If fast enough memory can be had, the EV6 bus will give the K7 a big edge over the Pentium III -- Intel's current top bus speed is 100 MHz.
