AMD Opteron

            

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Evolution of product line

Most analysts believed that AMD was the only serious competitor to Intel in the desktop PC processor market. They also felt microprocessor prices were affordable mainly because of AMD. Intel would have exercised its monopoly power far more, had there been no AMD. Apart from pushing Intel's prices down, AMD had also forced Intel to introduce faster and more powerful chips more quickly. Despite being a distant second to Intel, AMD had continued to impress analysts, launching innovative products at regular intervals.

AMD's K5 released in 1996 was designed to take on the Pentium. The chip was fully compatible with all software that was written for Pentium. AMD devised the P-rating system (or PR rating) to indicate the speed as compared to the Intel Pentium equivalent. K5s ran from 75 MHz to 166 MHz (in P-ratings). The K5 contained 24KB of L1 cache and 4.3 million transistors. While the K5 was reviewed as good5, AMD really arrived on the scene with its release of K6. The new chip significantly closed the gap between Intel and AMD.

The K6 processor compared, performance-wise, to the new Intel Pentium IIs and the MMX6 instruction set developed by Intel. Based on the RISC86 micro-architecture, the K6 contained seven parallel execution engines and two-level branch prediction. It contained 64KB of L1 cache (32KB for data and 32KB for instructions). During its life span, it was released in 166MHz to 300 MHz versions. It gave the early Pentium IIs a run for their money.

In 1998, AMD released the K6-2, which offered much higher speeds. The most notable feature of the K6-2 was the addition of 3DNow technology, which incorporated enhanced multimedia experience. This was just like Intel's MMX instruction, which had been developed to speed-up multimedia applications. With software designed to use the 3DNow instructions, multimedia applications received a boost. Using 3DNow, larger L1 cache, on-die L2 cache and Socket 7 usability, the K6-2 gained ranks in the market without too much trouble. AMD followed this up with the K6-3, essentially a K6-2 with 256 KB of on-die L2 cache.

With the release of the Athlon in 1999, AMD strengthened its reputation in the high performance segment. The Athlon came with the highest clock speeds amongst all microprocessors. The whole line started with the original Athlon classic. The original Athlon came at 500MHz. Also notable in the Athlon was the entirely new system bus7. AMD licensed the Alpha EV6 technology from Digital Equipment Corporation. This bus operated at 200MHz, faster than anything Intel was using.

Athlon continued to go through revisions and improvements. In June 2000, AMD released the Athlon Thunderbird. This chip came with an improved design, on-die full speed L28 cache (new for Athlon), DDR RAM9 support, etc. It developed the reputation for going well beyond the speed rating assigned by AMD.

In May 2001, AMD released Athlon "Palomino", also dubbed the Athlon 4. But even two years after launch, the market perception was that Intel's Pentium IV was much better in performance, compared to Athlon. AMD responded with the new Palomino, which offered reduced heat and power consumption. AMD-based notebooks, until this time, were still using K6-2's and K6-3's and thus AMD had not established a reputation for performance in the mobile market.

Palomino was later released in the desktop market, workstations, and multiprocessor servers (with its true dual processor support). Palomino made use of AMD's "PowerNow!" technology, which had been around since the K6-2 days. This technology allowed the chip to change its voltage requirements and clock speed depending on the usage requirement of the time. This feature made the chip ideally suited for power-sensitive applications such as laptop computers. In 2003, AMD moved into the 64-bit architecture by the release of its Opteron class of microprocessors.

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5] "A CPU History" by David Risley, PC Mechanic, 2001.
6] Short for Multimedia Extensions, a set of 57 multimedia instructions built into Intel microprocessors and other x86-compatible microprocessors. MMX-enabled microprocessors can handle many common multimedia operations, such as digital signal processing (DSP), that are normally handled by a separate sound or video card. However, only software especially written to call MMX instructions-so-called MMX-enabled software-can take advantage of the MMX instruction set.
7] System Bus: In broadest terms, a bus is a common connection between electrical devices. System bus most commonly means the data pathway that connects a processor to memory and to other peripheral devices.
8] L2 means Level 2 cache, three levels of cache reduce memory latency; Level 1 cache, Level 2 cache and Level 3 cache.
9] Short for Double Data Rate DDR RAM is a type of RAM (Random Access Memory) that supports data transfers on both edges of the signal, effectively doubling the memory chip's data throughput. In case of an application like Microsoft Word, the program is called up from its permanent storage area (like the hard drive, floppy disk, or CD-ROM) and moved into temporary storage area like the RAM, where it sends requests to the CPU. This enables the PC to run fast.