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July
4, 2000 - By Dave
Altavilla
In this weeks installment of "my PC
is faster than yours", we have a new
processor that has emerged in the High End
space. AMD's long awaited
Thunderbird (god I love that code name)
has arrived and it's sporting 256K of on
chip full speed L2 Cache. Along with
this new CPU, we will be using a new
motherboard from Gigabyte,
the GA-7VX (full review coming soon),
designed around VIA's new KX133 chipset
affording AGP4X and PC133 memory support
to the Athlon platform. The
combination of this new round of
technology from the two primary Intel
competitors, has painted a landscape of
options for the end user.
This
is a HotHardware evaluation and a project
of sorts, with two very mainstream
products in the AMD platform. We are
pairing the Gigabyte GA-7VX with the AMD
Thunderbird Athlon 700MHz.
Processor. Both of these products
are very reasonably priced and should be
as much of an "average" users
configuration as any mid range Intel base
platform on the market. We'll look
at the features and performance.
Then, just for the "fun factor",
we'll over-clock the stuffing out of it
(no Vapochill
here, just standard equipment) to see what
it will do. In
addition, there are some subtle nuances
you need to be careful of with any new
architecture. More on this later.
We
would like to start this review off right
by giving thanks to our good buds over at Azzo
Computers for hooking us up with the
T-Bird 700. We don't make to many
recommendations around here, on where the
best places are to buy your hardware but
when we do, they have to be top notch
people to get our plug. Azzo
is definitely one of those
places.
Now,
let's look at our setup.
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Specifications Of The Bird |
| Cold
Hard Cache |
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Historically,
the Athlon core was populated on a multi
chip printed circuit board for the Slot A
configuration. The SRAM L2 Cache was
installed on the CPU Module
discretely. This allowed for a large
cache size but slower access times and
getting on and off the CPU core to access
that cache was slower than the integrated
solution of today.
Look
Ma! No SRAM chips! (click image)
This
is an image of the new Athlon that AMD
code named "Thunderbird".
As you can see in this shot, there are no
SRAM chips on the PCB. All of the
T-Bird's SRAM cache is now on chip and
running at full speed with the
processor. You may have already seen
the Socket A version of the T-Bird which
is set up for a 462 Pin Grid Socket.
In the event you haven't yet, here is what
this chips looks like.
Just
keep in mind that we will be taking a look
at the SLOT A version of this chip, as
shown in the top shot. This will be
important to remember later on in our
tests. Here are the rest of the
specifics for the T-Bird. Both chips
have the same electrical specs with the
exception of the form, factor obviously.
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Multiple
parallel x86 instruction decoders
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Three
out-of-order, superscalar, fully
pipelined floating point execution
units, which execute x87 (floating
point), MMX? and 3DNow!?
instructions
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Three
out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined
integer units
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Three
out-of-order, superscalar, pipelined
address calculation units
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72-entry
instruction control unit
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Advanced
dynamic branch prediction
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Enhanced
3DNow!? technology for leading-edge
3D performance
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21
original 3DNow! instructions-the first
technology enabling superscalar SIMD
-
19
new instructions to enable improved
integer math calculations for speech
or video encoding
and improved data movement for
Internet plug-ins and other streaming
applications
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5
new DSP instructions to improve soft
modem, soft ADSL, Dolby Digital
surround sound, and MP3 applications
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Compatible
with Windows® 98, Windows 95, and
Windows NT® 4.x without software
patches
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200MHz
AMD Athlon? system bus enabling
leading-edge system bandwidth for data
movement-intensive applications
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Source
synchronous clocking (clock
forwarding) technology
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Support
for 8-bit ECC for data bus integrity
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Peak
bandwidth of 1.6 to 3.2 GB/s
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Multiprocessing
support: point-to-point topology, with
number of processors in SMP systems
determined by chipset implementation
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Support
for 24 outstanding transactions per
processor
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128K
of L1 cache and 256K of integrated,
on-chip L2 cache for a total of 384K
full speed, on-chip cache
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Slot
A - Available
in processor cartridge with mechanical
dimensions comparable to Pentium®
III. Leverages existing
physical/mechanical Slot 1 PC
infrastructure, including mechanical
connector, but with different bus
protocols and electrical definitions
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Electrical
interface compatible with 200MHz AMD
Athlon system bus, based on Alpha EV6
bus protocol
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Socket
A - Available in Pin Grid Array (PGA)
for mounting in a socketed
infrastructure
Electrical interface compatible with
200MHz AMD Athlon system bus, based on
Alpha EV6? bus protocol
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Die
size: approximately 37 million
transistors on 120 mm2 die
on 0.18-micron process technology
If
you look at this architecture from a
"specsmanship" standpoint, one
would have to admit that AMD has Intel
beaten for the most advanced architecture
in PC processors right now, at least for
what is available on the market
today. Again, the two main strong
points here are that the internal system
bus runs at 200MHz. and the on chip cache
is running at full speed with the
processor. The later of the two
bullets is something that Intel has had
since the earlier days of the P3 and it is
why AMD lagged slightly in performance on
some applications, until now.
Finally, there is also support for
Multi-Processor systems although there are
no motherboards or chipsets shipping
currently that support it.
So, in an
effort not to bore you with an
over-abundance of technical detail, let's
plug our new "Winged Bird" in
and hit the power button.
Installation,
Setup, stability and Overclocking
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