AMD Shows Off 1.1 GHz Athlon

chamega writes "AMD demonstrated a 1.1 GHz processor Monday without any special cooling techniques. The processor is said to use "high-performance on-die Level 2 (L2) cache," whatever that means. " Perhaps, unlike Intel, they'll actually be able to /ship/ their high-end chips when they say they will.

Comments

...Darn! And I just bought a 600!

[jht]

Of course, I only paid $240 for my Athlon 600 processor, so I don't feel too deprived.

To the people wondering just how a system with only a 200 MHz bus (and PC100 RAM, at that) can be useful at 1.1 GHz:

First of all, if you're dropping the kind of change on one of these that is appropriate, you'll have more than a puny 64MB of RAM. It's liklier that you'll have at least 128 MB or probably 256 MB+. So you won't have a huge problem with disk thrashing. Just make sure if you were to use one of these beasts that the rest of the system is up to the task. That means a fast ATA or Ultra SCSI disk, a fast 3D card (don't be using no Rage Pro!), and the best memory that the system spec works with. I use all PC-133 nowadays.

On the other side of this is the processor itself. On-die cache (Celerons, CuMine PIII processors) is much faster than the variety that is mounted on the PCB (older PII and III and current Athlons). It can run at full processor clock instead of, say, 1/2 clock or 2/5 clock. Because of this speed advantage, less of it goes a long way. Older PII and PIII designs used 512k of on-board cache, which is replaced by 256k of on-die in the CuMines (128k in the Celery). With a big, fast L2 cache a lot of your instructions are fetched from cache and executed much faster - and of course a big L1 cache helps, too. Also, SDRAM does a better job of feeding data in bursts than older EDO and FP RAM did. But RAM technology is becoming the bottleneck lately. Rambus and DDR SDRAM is supposed to help, but DDR isn't really there yet, and Rambus has been a fiasco to date and the yields are allegedly horrible.

Ultimately, on-die cache allows the cache to run at either full CPU speed or a high divisor of it. PCB cache is more constrained. But faster processors will always make a difference no matter what - it's just that after you outrun the rest of the system it's a matter of diminishing returns. An Athlon 1000 is not necessarily exactly twice as fast as an Athlon 500 - but it's still wicked fast!

- -Josh Turiel