AMD - Athlon (K7 / Athlon Professional)
Athlon in standard plastic shell - Slot A
AMD's Athlon uses a Slot A architecture that is physically compatible with Intel's Slot 1, but electrically compatible with the DEC's EV-6 Alpha bus, instead of Intel's closed P6 bus architecture. The EV-6 bus has the potential to run at up to 400MHz, starting at 200MHz initially (100MHz * 2).
The Athlon features 19 new 3D instructions with a 128-bit pipeline, backwards compatible with the 3DNow! instructions, but faster, to give Intel's SSE a run for the money.
The K7 will feature chipsets that support SMP or Symmetric Multi-Processing, but not until mid-2001. The K7 will be the first non-Intel x86 chip to be used in systems with more than one processor in a system. Dual processing systems will be first, and then 4 and 8 processor systems as well. This will be significant in the workstation and server market. The K6 architecture is capable of multiprocessing as well, but we will never see a SMP chipset available for it.
All standard Athlons ship with 512K of off-chip L2 cache running at either 1/2, 2/5 or 1/3 processor speed.
The Athlon was initially manufactured on a .25 micron process (C Athlons), but then were moved quickly to a .18 micron process (A Athlons). A and C Athlons can be told apart by looking for an A or C to the right of the part number listed on the plastic shell surrounding them. All Athlons at 750MHz and above are manufactured on a .18 micron process. There were some .25 micron 750MHz Athlons manufactured, but they never made it to market.
The Athlon features 3 integer, 3 floating point and 3 address calculation pipelines. The integer pipelines are 10-stage and the floating point pipelines are 15-stage.
As for benchmarks, so far the K7 600 with 1/2 speed L2 cache is clocking in at around 28 Specint95 and 24 Specfp95. Check Spec.org for other scores. You may also want to check out the Duron, and Thunderbird tables for additional insight into AMD's Athlon line of processors.