Print this article

AMD 1.4GHz Athlon


Date
: 08/16/01 – 11:52:51 PM

Author
:

Category
: Processors

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: AMD
Price: $200

Thanks to AMD for supplying us with a review sample!

Introduction

Today O takes a closer look at the fastest AMD Athlon CPU out there: the one that comes in a 1.4GHz flavor. With the new Athlon, better known as the Palomino, coming out soon, this is the last ‘Thunderbird’ Athlon that will see the light of day, as the new Athlon ‘Palomino’ will debut in September 2001 with an entrylevel speed of 1.33GHz/1.4GHz. Is the current Athlon dead meat? Not at all!! This CPU is still very much alive and its performance can compete with the most powerful processors currently available! Over the years, two to be exact, AMD has managed to over double the speed of the Athlon core from 650MHz to 1400MHz!The engineers over at Advanced Micro Devices have really made a good processor, as it is still king of the hill two years later.

Like I previously mentioned, the Athlon ‘Palomino’ is coming soon.But the real question is, should I wait for it and postpone buying a new Athlon CPU today?It depends on what you plan on doing with your processor actually. A big reason why you should get a Palomino is because the new Palomino core outputs less heat, giving you more breathing room as far as cooling is concerned.

Now what makes the Athlon ‘Palomino’ different from the current Athlon? The new one has a slightly larger core, from 120mm to 128mm to be exact.And it has been tweaked quite efficiently, now offering more features and the above-mentioned heat output reduction. Another good addition to the Palomino is a thermal diode. At the moment we measure CPU temps with the diode that sits underneath the CPU on the motherboard. With the new Athlon CPU, there is a diode inside the CPU core, which will result in much more accurate temperature monitoring!

Another difference between both cores is that the Palomino carries extra 3DNow! instructions (SSE compatible) and also that the Palomino will be equiped with Data Pre-fetch on the cache memory.

AMD released the 1.4GHz Athlon as a powerful multimedia processor that should be capable of running everything you throw at it without any hick-ups. And that is what we are testing today! Interested on how this little adventure ends? Read on!

Page 2 : History

A Little History Lesson

The Advanced Micro Devices saga started a long time ago, back in 1969 to be exact. Their head office is based in the United States of America, more specifically in Sunnyvale, California. As the years went by, AMD built themselves into a nice community, with 11 fabrication plants divided into 3 important parts: production, testing and quality support.

The fabs most of you will know (or have heard of anyway) are the production fabs: SDC or Sub Micron Development Center which is located in their home town Sunnyvale, Fab 14,15 and 25 which are situated in Austin, Fab 30 in Dresden and last but not least FASL I and FASL II (Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited which is housed in Japan. Three of these fabs are in charge on producing the actual CPUs (central processing units), all the others produce flash memory.



Those fabs are nothing like your local grocery store … no sir! Actually each fab is a small community on its own, because if you know that AMD’s megafab in Dresden, Germany cost around 1.9 billion dollars (ouch!) and gives work to approximately 1500 people, you know it is huge! The plant is built on a 100 acre territory and measures around 11,000m. With that it is one of the most important industrial sites in East Germany. Dresden is also AMD’s only fab that can produce processors with copper interconnects, so you might want to get a little bratwurst with that Athlon.

Here is a small summary of AMD’s birth, goals, achievements and more:

Overview

- Founded in 1969
- Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
- 14,435 employees worldwide
- More than 50 percent of sales are international
- Global manufacturing: U.S., Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Germany, and China

Target Markets

- Personal and networked computation
- Major market segments
- Personal computing
- Consumer and business desktop and notebook systems

Industry Leadership

AMD is among the market leaders in each of its core businesses: microprocessors, non-volatile memories and networking applications.

- Processors
- Embedded Processors
- Networking Products
- Memory Products

What can we conclude after seeing all this data? AMD has been growing a lot, and over the past decades they’ve managed to evolve from the underdog position they were in for years, to the ruling position they are in now. And the saga has not ended yet because as we will show you in the roadmap discussion, AMD has more aces up their sleeve…

The Athlon & Duron Processors

The Athlon & its little brother, the Duron processor, are the CPUs which took AMD to its leading position. But before those, AMD had several other projects running! In 1991 AMD started building the AM386 CPU, which was AMD counterpart on the Intel i386 processor. By the end of October in that same year over a million CPUs had been produced.

About a year or two later, after AMD made a deal with Fujitsu, the AM486 CPU was released. This took place around the same time they opened Fab25 located in Austin. The real success had not yet surfaced for AMD, but when they managed to get a license on Intel’s 287 math coprocessor technology in 1994 they could start on what would become the first of the K-series processors: the AMD K5. The K5 was AMD’s answer to the Intel Pentium processor and was available in the following flavors: PR75, PR90, PR100, PR120, PR133 and PR166. These CPUs were
‘rated’ at a certain speed, which meant that for example the PR166 was rated to perform equal to an Intel Pentium 166 while the actual core speed of the PR166 was 117MHz. All the other K5 CPUs ever built used the same speed marking technique.

AMD’s next achievement was called the K6, number two in the famous K-line. It had a few redesigns in the form of the K6-2 and the K6-3 processors, which were intended to compete with Intel’s Pentium II CPU. This took place in 1997. One year later, the K7 processors were born, quickly announced as the Athlon. At the beginning, the K7 Athlon was housed in a SlotA package with the L2 cache chips
not
on die.

Later on, AMD switched to the current layout called socketA. Thanks to the socketA design, we have the L2 on die now, which removed AMD’s bottleneck over Intel CPUs: L2 cache running slower than the core itself.

With the socketA layout, a new CPU was born: the Duron. AMD targeted at the value market with this processor, which was actually an Athlon with half the cache size.But pretty soon they noticed that the Duron kicked Intel’s Pentium III processor on almost every level. For a CPU that was meant as a contender for the Celeron, this was a very nice achievement on AMD’s part.

The upcoming Athlon, codenamed
Palomino
, will also be using the socketA design.And even the CPU that will be released after the Palomino will still be using this design! This means that your current socketA motherboard should be able to support all these upcoming processors (if the manufacturer followed all the AMD guidelines of course).

To finish this brief look at AMD’s achievements and upcoming plans, we’ll have a closer look at their latest roadmap.

The roadmap covers 2001 and 2002, and since we are half way through the year, this gives us the opportunity to look back on the first half of the year 2001 as well.

Like the roadmap is showing, the mobile Athlon, which uses the Palomino core as well, has already been released just like the AthlonMP, which is a SMP capable version of the Palomino, also based upon the Palomino core. The AthlonMP is currently available in two flavors: 1.0GHz and 1.2GHz but we expect faster versions to be released soon. We are seeing the Athlon4 showing up in the mobile market as well now, thanks to the PowerNow! technology that lets the CPU alter its core speed in a matter of seconds. This technology is an advanced version of Intel’s SpeedStep technology and it is designed to enlarge the uptime when using batteries but also to reduce heat output in the laptop. This is another reason why AMD waited to introduce the Athlon into the mobile market: the Palomino core runs much cooler than the TBird core.

In the second half of this year, we should see the Athlon4 enter the desktop market, replacing the current Athlon ‘TBird’. At the same time AMD will release the new Duron core codenamed ‘Morgan’. What’s so special about it? Well, the Morgan will use the same core as the Palomino but with less on die cache memory. AMD will also release a server version of the Morgan, which means that there will be something like the DuronMP … indeed … dual Duron systems will be available! By the time the Palomino and the Morgan settles in, the year will be as good as over.

So what holds 2002 for us? In 1H02 AMD will introduce the
Thoroughbred
core for the Athlon, which will use a smaller die: 0.13 micron to be exact. What will this bring us? In short: less heat and higher core speeds. The official name for the Thoroughbred is not yet known, but Athlon5 could be in the running …

Of course we can’t have a new core for the Athlon and leave the Duron in the cold … so we present you the
Appaloosa
. Just like the Thoroughbred, the Appaloosa will be using a 0.13 micron die size, again increasing core speeds and reducing heat output.

By the end of 2002, AMD will than perform another core change, but only for the Athlon processor (at least according to the current roadmap).

The Thoroughbred will be replaced with the
Barton
, which will still use a 0.13 micron die, but it will be equipped with SOI, which is short for Silicon On Isolator and it will help to cool down the core even more. The Barton is expected to have speeds of over 3.0GHz.But since these CPUs are still covered in a huge pile of secrecy, not much is known about them.

Around the same time as the Barton is released, AMD will introduce the
ClawHammer
and
SledgeHammer
processors. These are AMD’s 64-bit processors and of course will be aimed towards the high-end and especially server market. The ClawHammer will offer 2-way SMP whereas the SledgeHammer will have 4/8-way SMP support.

This rounds up our short look on AMD’s roadmap, and shows that there is a lot to come from Advanced Micro Devices!

Page 3 : Specifications

Specifications

Unlike what most people think, clockspeed isn’t everything! There are other factors that influence the performance of a processor like its cache speed and the amount of cache for example. Here are a few specs from today’s Athlon CPUs in the socket A format:

- socket A format also known as socket 462 (which stands for the number of pins on the bottom)
- 650MHz to 1400MHz core speeds
- 128kB L1 cache
- 256kB L2 cache
- Cache speed is equal to CPU core speed
- 1.75v core voltage
- 200/266MHz DDR bus

As you can see, the AMD CPUs are using a socket A or socket 462 grid. This is much like Intel’s socket 370 design, but the AMD has more pins, 462 to be more specific. Although the Athlon is cruising at 1.4GHz, the core voltage is still humming along at 1.75v. This shows that the Athlon design has always been capable of hitting higher speeds and does not need an increase in core voltage to remain stable. If we look at Intel, we’ll notice that they had to increase the core voltage on the Pentium III to reach 1GHz stable, showing that the CPU is reaching its limits. This is certainly not the case and we’ll prove it when we will see how high the CPU can be clocked before becoming unstable.

Although the core voltage is running at 1.75v, the Athlon is still emitting a lot of heat. At 650MHz the Athlon emits a maximum of 38W of heat.

If we look at the 1.4GHz counterpart, we are reading a maximum heat output of 72W! Is this a bad thing? Yes! … Heat is something we don’t want to see near a computer, as it reduces lifetime of a component. There is a rule that says the lifetime doubles every time the temperature drops 10 degrees celcius. The days that we ran our CPUs without fans or with those tiny heatsinks are definitely over!! To get rid of 72W of CPU power, good cooling is needed, and even with a high end heatsink, temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius are no exception at full load.

Running a CPU without heatsink or with a heatsink that is mounted incorrect results in a fried CPU in a matter of seconds … which I am sure many of you experienced first hand :(. With the above said, we also covered the only downside of the Athlon CPUs: heat. The AthlonMP processors are said to run cooler but since I had not the chance to test one I can not confirm this … When the Athlon4 gets out on the street, the heat problem should be taken care of as well since the Athlon4 is the same CPU as the AthlonMP, just not certified for SMP applications.

Back in the days when AMD still used the SlotA layout instead of today’s SocketA layout, their CPUs had a hard time keeping up with the Intel counterparts because AMD had to run the cache at much lower speeds than the CPU itself. Luckily, AMD engineers got rid of this bottleneck and just like Intel, AMD installs the cache into the CPU core which means that it is running at the same speed as the core and with that removing the cache bottleneck! Now we have cache cruising at 1400MHz, we still need a decent amount of it to perform at top speed. The Athlon comes with 128kB L1 cache and 256kB L2 cache. The only difference between an Athlon and a Duron processor is the amount of cache. The Duron only has 64kB L1 cache, which is half the amount that the Athlon carries. Is this a very bad thing? Not really. Benchmarks show that the Duron can keep up with the Athlon is most cases and only when many applications run at the same time, the extra cache is needed. Should you pay more for an Athlon than? That depends on your needs: if you are looking for a well performing value machine, a Duron will do perfectly fine, but if you need the best of the best there is nothing real contender for the Athlon. And since the Duron is only available up to 950MHz (the 1GHz Duron will be released soon), you have no other option but the Athlon if you need 1.4GHz. Please note that the Duron is only available with a front side bus of 100MHz whereas the Athlon is also available with a front side bus of 133MHz, which of course give a pretty nice speed boost.

Another advantage of the AMD processors is its advanced use of the DDR bus. AMD has been implementing DDR into their CPUs for a long time but since most motherboards still used PC133 memory it was only useful for the internal connections. Today several DDR platforms are available for the socketA market and the true power of the socketA CPUs can be released! AMD has always released their CPUs in two versions: a 200MHz (uses a 100MHz FSB) and a 266MHz (uses a 133MHz FSB) version. Teamed up with a good DDR board and some high quality DDR
memory, this processor can kick some serious butt, as you will see later on!

Page 4 : Overclocking & Testing

Overclocking

AMD processors are known to be able to run at much higher clockspeeds than what they are sold at, and although the 1.4GHz is coming closer and closer to the core’s limitations, our sample was rockstable all the way up to 1.55GHz. We did not push the envelope and did not use extreme cooling to get the most out of the cpu, but still we got an extra 155MHz for free. If watercooling or other more extreme cooling methods was used, chances are that this cpu would have settled between 1.6 and 1.7GHz! You can’t complain with numbers like that can you?

Look at the testbed … sweet heh? That Coolermaster heatsink is the default heatsink that AMD provides with their cpu’s.

What does this tell us? It means that the AMD Thunderbird core still has power left, and that AMD could easily release a 1.5GHz version of the TBird if they want to. Our sources told us that AMD has no intention to release another TBird, and they also told us that the Palomino will debute at a speed of 1.33GHz. This means that there will be an overlapping at 1.33GHz and 1.4GHz.



Another shot of the test setup. As you can see we are using Crucial DDR memory in this setup.

Testing

In order to test this 1.4GHz powerchip, we literally threw it in front of the lions. Starting with this CPU review, we are introducing a new way of benchmarking the processors. That way you, the visitor, will be provided with more information and feedback and we will also have the possibility to compare the results we achieve with other CPU reviews in the near future. We also added several new benchmarks to the list just to give you more data to compare.

Here is our test system:

- EPoX 8K7A+ SocketA motherboard based upon the AMD761 chipset
- Thermal Take Dragon Orb heatsink
- 2x128MB Crucial PC2100 DDR memory
- AMD 1.4GHz CPU
- VisionTek GeForce3
- Western Digital 20GB UDMA100 7200rpm hard drive
- Accton NIC
- Windows 2000 + SP2 + Detonator 12.90 drivers

As you can see, our test system is equipped with the best technology currently available, featuring a high end DDR powered motherboard that is capable of running up to 166MHz FSB rockstable (word says that it will do 180MHz as well but we haven’t tested it that high yet). This system combined with the list of benchmarks we have sitting here, will result is a good and objective view on the processor we tested, in this case the AMD 1.4GHz Athlon.



This is the package in which AMD transports their processors … safe and secure!

Let’s start with the first benchmarks shall we?

Sisoft Sandra Benchmark suite

CPU Benchmark

Multimedia CPU Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

Quake3 Arena

Demo001

Torture Demo

MadOnion’s 3D Mark 2001

ZDNet Benchmark Suite

CPU Mark

FPU Mark

Distributed.net RC5 Short Benchmark

The benchmarks are definately showing the Athlon’s true power and they tell us once more that the Athlon is not dead yet and still has a lot of muscles underneath its sleeves ;). Business applications, gaming, multimedia, … you name it, the Athlon handles it with ease. For distributed computing, the AMD processors are very good too as they have a faster FPU (Floating Point Unit) compared to their Intel competitors.

Page 5 : Conclusion

Conclusion

The AMD 1.4GHz Athlon, the last one of the TBird family, has proven itself to be one heck of a processor, capable of running every single application that you throw at it and finishing every task in matter of nanoseconds. AMD has another winner with this power-hungry CPU as it is capable of overtaking Intel’s P4 at 1.7GHz in almost every benchmark! For a processor that is running 300MHz slower, this is a very sweet result if you ask me. The reason why the Athlon beats the P4 by such a large margin is because of the lack of optimization for the P4. As there will come more support, the gap between both CPUs will most certainly get smaller. But if we look at today’s situation, there is only one question left: should you go out and buy it? That totally depends on what you need. If you want the latest and the greatest, I suggest you hold on a little bit longer to those greenies until the Athlon4 becomes available because it will be a tad faster but more important it will run much cooler which is always a good thing. If you need a processor today, there is no need to wait any longer because this 1.4GHz Athlon will fulfil all your
dreams and more and it has an incredible price/performance ratio as well! I would recommend this CPU to anyone as it is much cheaper than its counterpart, the Pentium 4 and it outperforms it as well. Do I need to say more?