AMD Athlon

The Chipsets

The current chipset used to drive the Athlon is the AMD 750 chipset. The 750 is very similar to the Intel 440BX in the sense that it supports a 100MHz memory bus, AGP 2X, Ultra ATA 33/66, and a handful of the basic features that BX motherboard owners have come to expect.

The main difference is obviously that the 750 supports a connection to the EV6 bus protocol instead of the GTL+ used by the BX chipset, and unfortunately the 750 only supports single processor configurations which won't truly take advantage of the EV6 bus.

ALi, SiS, and VIA have already announced that they will be working on solutions for the Athlon due out either later this year or early in 2000. The VIA solution will be the one to look out for, sources close to VIA have indicated that their Athlon chipset will support AGP 4X transfer modes, PC133, Ultra ATA 66, but will still be for uni-processor systems only. ALi and SiS should have competitive solutions as well, but if history has taught us anything, we should expect at least one low cost Athlon chipset to emerge for the users that want the performance without all of the frills.

While AMD has been boasting support for multiprocessor Athlon setups, the question no one seems to ask is where are the multiprocessor chipsets and motherboards? Making a multiprocessor chipset and motherboard is extremely difficult, especially for manufacturers that have never done it before. AMD is hinting at next year for the first dual processor Athlon systems, however the chipsets that will support it are currently not in existence. Keep your eyes open for what happens there, it should be very interesting.

AGP Miniport Drivers

Remember the wonderful AGP miniport drivers for Super7 chipsets? Don't worry, the AMD 750's miniport is nowhere near as bad as the older VIA/ALi drivers which is a very good thing, however how compatible is the 750 with current generation AGP cards?

For those of you that think that only AMD owners have to use AGP GART drivers you're misinforming yourself, Intel LX/BX owners need them too. The only difference is that the drivers for Intel's implementation of the AGP Graphics Addressing and Remapping Table are built in to Windows 98 and therefore you don't need to load any drivers externally.

Unfortunately, AMD does not have the same luxury, and they must have their AGP GART miniport drivers installed for true compatibility. The drivers are currently at revision 4.45, the drivers that shipped with the Athlon review systems was revision 4.41 and the drivers we used were revision 4.44. The only differences between the three are minor performance tweaks, and some compatibility issues.

So here's the big question, can you use an Athlon with a TNT2? Yes. A G400? Yes. All other current AGP 2X cards? Yes. What about the NV10 and 3dfx's next-generation product? You can never say for sure, but it would be very unexpected if they didn't work with the AMD 750 or other Athlon chipsets using the latest AGP GART drivers.

The performance of the drivers is still not up to their full potential, but even with the drivers operating at their current level of performance the Athlon packs quite a punch.