AMD Athlon

The 128KB of L1 operating at clock speed is accompanied by a Pentium II/III-esque L2 cache operating at a fraction of the clock speed located on the processor card. The Athlon architecture allows from 512KB up to 16MB of L2 cache to be included on the processor's card, however the first shipping Athlons will feature 512KB. Like the Pentium II/III, the Athlon's 512KB of L2 cache operates at 1/2 the core clock speed, but the flexible architecture allows for the L2 cache to operate at other fractions such as 1/3 clock speed or even at clock speed like Intel's Xeon processor. The reason for such a wide range of supported options is so that AMD can branch out and produce a number of different Athlons, such as a low cost Athlon (like Intel's Celeron), and a high end Athlon with a larger, faster cache. AMD's roadmap calls for the Athlon branding to split into multiple types of Athlon processors. This mimics how the original Pentium II has grown into the Intel Celeron for the low end/entry level, the Intel Pentium III for the mainstream, and the Intel Pentium III Xeon for the high end users.

The Athlon will be initially released in 500, 550, and 600MHz parts with L2 caches running at 250, 275, and 300MHz respectively. In early September, AMD will officially launch the 650MHz Athlon (325MHz L2), which is ahead of their original schedule. Not only is AMD attempting to go head to head with Intel in a clock speed battle, they are looking to beat them in performance at each clock frequency. The 600MHz Athlon processors AMD shipped to reviewers featured 3.3ns NEC made L2 cache, which mathematically is able to handle the 300MHz operating frequency the 600 demands. The current specification of the 500 - 650MHz parts call for a core voltage setting of 1.6v, which is 0.4v less than the Pentium III's voltage 2.0v requirement.