(^68) PC Hardware: A Beginner’s Guide
AMD Athlon
The honor of having the new powerhouse processor may have moved to AMD with the
release of its 1GHz AMD Athlon, pictured in Figure 3-22. The Athlon boasts 22 million
transistors, support for Intel’s MMX and AMD’s 3DNow, and improved FPU functions.
It also has the power to decode more instructions simultaneously than the Pentium III,
with 256KB of L2 cache and 128KB of L1 cache on the chip. The Athlon is plug compatible
with the Slot 1 connector, but it is designed for AMD’s Slot A bus, which runs at bus
speeds of 200MHz to 400MHz.
A derivative of the Athlon is the AMD Duron. The AMD Duron processor is designed
for general computing, including business, home user, and portable applications. The
Duron processor is available at clock speeds of 600MHz, 650MHz, and 700MHz.
Intel Pentium 4
The latest of the Intel processors is the Intel Pentium 4 (Figure 3-23), which is available with
processor speeds of 1.3 to 1.5 GHz (gigahertz). The Pentium 4 uses a new proprietary
micro-architecture called Net-Burst, which features a 400 MHz system bus, advanced
on-board caching, enhanced floating point math and multimedia support, and hyper-
pipelining technology. The Pentium 4 also supports the use of dual-channel RDRAM.Figure 3-22. The AMD Athlon microprocessor. Photo courtesy of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.