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Latest AMD CPUs

Older AMD Athlon Info
C.Haines 8/9/99

-Athlon's are shipping now! Should you get one now? No, wait till they get all the bugs worked out and they get cheaper. The Athlon sure looks good!

-I guess the best thing to say about the Athlon is it Rocks! Its about time that Pentium wasn't ahead of the game and AMD made a top notch CPU. Most of you that read through this site know that I love the AMD, and I will laugh as Pentium Lovers start to backtrack and say that they "always" supported the AMD. So what's to this new little creature that raised its shiny plastic head from the bushes of AMD? It a nutshell, its a new architecture and real fast. We are getting closer to what a computer's processor should be and hopefully will hit the Gigahertz before the end of this year.

Speeds

-The Athlon will be coming in a few speeds to choose from and of course the price tag gets smaller as you decrease speed. Now take note that these prices will only drop and even for being brand new there real cheap, cheaper than some Pentiums out there.

• 650MHz $849.00 per (k)
• 600MHz $600.00 per (k)
• 550Mhz $449.00 per (k)
• 500Mhz $249.00 Per (k)

-Even at 500Mhz the price is more reasonable than many processors out there. Be assured my system will have one as soon as there a little cheaper.

-Now when it comes to speed, we see many processor's out there capable of running 500MHz but what sets the AMD apart from the rest of the game? Easy, better floating point, better integer performance, 200 MHz Bus Speeds, Fat L1 cache of 128k, and break neck speeds.

Infrastructure Support

-Now along with all these new feature we need a better chipset on the motherboard to accept these changes along with support from Expansion card vendors. AMD has developed the AMD-750 which will provide a good system logic for system features and bus controllers. Chipset vendors Via, Ali, and SiS will also make and deliver chipsets to support the Athlon architecture.

-Along with just the hardware support we need to know that the BIOS will jive with all of these goodies. American Megatrends, Award, and Phoenix are also planning to offer support for the new Athlon. So far so good.

-Athlon Motherboards are at the moment a little hard to get a hold of, much less the processor but FIC, Asus, Microstar, and Gigabyte are all offering the motherboards right now.

-If you are concerned about your Video Cards and so on working on this new motherboard check with your Vendor for further details. Most of the big players are all offering updated drivers for there products on the newer Athlon Machines.

-Check out some good benchmarks and why the Athlon is Spanking Pentium III processor's.

-To wrap it up just wait a while and let the CPU get down in price and add it to your system. Its a little to earlier and we need to wait till everyone gets on the AMD boat and catch up with this architecture. But for those that cant wait, expect to have some aggravation here and there with chipsets and compatibility. You may need to either wait it out or upgrade your Video Cards and so forth immediately.

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