AMD Athlon K7 500MHz Processor Reviewed by CPU-zilla (3 Sep 99)
Processor Specifications
Clock Speed
- 500 MHz
System Bus Speed
- 100 MHz
Cache memory
- Level 1 Cache : 128K (64K Instruction + 64K Data)
- Level 2 Cache : 512K
Manufacturing Process
- 0.25 µm (22 million transistors)
CPU Voltage / Current
- 1.55-1.65V
- Max. Power Dissipation : 38W (550MHz), 41W (550MHz), 45W (600MHz), 48W (650MHz)
Math Co-processor
- Built-in
MMX Technology
- Yes
3D Now! Instructions
- Yes with new Enhanced 3DNow! technology
Package type
- Slot-A
<Introduction><The Good><The Test> <The Bad><Conclusion><Rating>
Introduction
The way that technology evolve is really amazing. Even more surprising is the rate at which technology betters itself. The lifetime of any new technology today seems shorter. Gone are the days when you can purchase a PC system and be assured that it is still compatible and fast enough even if it is two to three years old. I must say that it is hard to keep up with technology, and it is even harder for those developing them. Competition and market forces drive them that way, and there's no doubt that the coming new millenium would bring us even more fantastic innovations and technologies. I am certainly glad that I'm living in such exciting days.
The AMD K7 processor, or better known as the Athlon was released not long ago in the United States. I'm sure most of you would have read preliminary reports of this already famous piece of technology that's bred to kick out their long term competition, Intel. I guess the K7 has been AMD's secret weapon to help them reclaim back their share of the pie in the x86 microprocessor market. Others like Cyrix and Winchip have come and gone due to the lack of market interest. Cyrix and Winchip processors aren't bad at all, however, due to poor pricing and the availability of higher performance processors at lower prices, both Cyrix and Winchip suffered heavy losses and had to sell off their technology to VIA. Let's hope that VIA will join the race soon. On the other hand, little is known about the Rise mP6, and with every passing day, the likeliness of the Rise mP6 ever appearing in the market grows dimmer.
The Good
Discussing what's new and the technical details of the Athlon processor would be quite complicated. I have to admit that I have not yet comprehend the Athlon architecture yet, but after finding out more about the processor itself, it does look more impressive than the Pentium III. I find the article written by Tom of Tom's Hardware about the K7 processor architecture very refreshing, and I'd recommend that you read it if you want to know more technical details. I'm not a computer engineer by profession, so I guess I'll just skip it instead of making a terrible job of explaining it. :)
Anyway, to summarize, the Athlon K7 is built with larger and faster caches as compared to its predecessor, the K6, K6-2 and K6-3. The L1 cache is already bigger than other CPUs, and yes, it's bigger than the Pentium-III. The larger cache would help a lot especially when the processor is at higher clocked speeds. Already the upcoming Winchip 3 was built with a large 128K L1 cache. However, due to IDT selling off the Winchip division to VIA, the sample never made it into our labs. On the other hand, AMD has also increased the size of the L2 cache up to 512K, which is the same as Intel's Pentium II/III. Just like the Pentium II/III, the L2 cache runs at 1/2 the clock speed of the core processor. Although it may look very similar, AMD did design the Athlon to accept larger L2 cache of up to 8MB. This would certainly help AMD enter the server/high-end workstation market. In addition, the L2 cache speed could range from a ratio of 1/3, 2/3, 1/2 and 1/1 L2-cache clock/processor clock. This makes the Athlon very flexible and it won't be surprising to find various types of Athlon processors with various L2 cache size and speed in the near future.
Besides the cache, the Athlon's MMX instructions were updated with new instructions that were found in Intel's Pentium III. On the other hand, AMD have also added twenty four new 3DNow! instructions to enable improved integer math calculations for speech or video encoding, improve data movement for internet plug-ins and other streaming applications and digital signal processing (DSP) instructions that enhance the performance of communications applications, including soft modems, soft ADSL, MP3 and Dolby Digital surround sound processing. Anyway, it will be some time before we see some real use of this new Enhanced 3DNow! instructions.
The other interesting, and yet most important feature is the 1.6-Gigabyte per second system bus, which is the first bus of its kind for x86 system platforms. The bus is based on the Alpha™ EV6 interface protocol which was licensed from Digital Equipment Corporation. It does sound incredible when you see that the bus speed is 200MHz, but in actual fact, the front side bus is running at 100MHz. This is confusing, isn't it? Well, the front side bus does run at 100MHz (which is why normal PC-100 SDRAMs can still be used), but the EV6 bus takes advantage of the rising and falling edge of the bus clock signals, thus doubling the speed to 200MHz. In addition, AMD does have plans to increase the FSB to 133MHz, 200MHz, 266MHz or 333MHz in the near future. That will be a whopping 266MHz, 400MHz, 533MHz and 666MHz respectively. That is certainly impressive and it seems to me that this technology will be here to stay. However, this will put a lot of stress on motherboard manufacturers as it will be harder to make stable motherboards to support that kind of bus frequencies.
Last but not least, the EV6 bus supports up to 14 processors in SMP environments. This is good news for those who want powerful and yet affordable servers. Looks like AMD has finally taken the plunge into the high-end market. I can't wait to see how the Athlon perform in SMP environments.
The processor comes packaged like the Intel Slot-1 processors. In fact, without the heatsink/fan, one would easily mistaken it for an Intel Slot-1 processor. The heatsink/fan looks pretty simple and it looks fairly easy to remove unlike Intel's Pentium II/III processors. The heatsink is larger and comes built with a ball bearing fan. The fan is screwed onto the entire heatsink cover assembly, and it can be easily swapped with a bigger and better fan. However, I think the built-in heatsink/fan from Cooler Master is good enough. Anyway, it is still unclear whether the processor will be sold in boxed (including built-in fan) or tray versions.
In order to use the processor, you will need to purchase a Slot-A motherboard. Note that the processor is not compatible with Slot-1 motherboards, although they look exactly the same. Currently, only FIC, Gigabyte and Microstar manufactures motherboards for the new AMD Athlon K7 processor. It is strange to see lukewarm support from other Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers as this is truly an amazing product. However, Tom (from Tom's Hardware) does have an interesting theory (or fact) about why other big manufacturers (like ABIT and ASUS) have decided not to manufacture Slot-A motherboards. Let's hope that his speculation isn't true.
The chipset used on the motherboard is currently manufactured by AMD itself. The chipset termed "Irongate" consists of a highly integrated AMD® 751 system controller (Northbridge) and AMD® 756 (Viper) peripheral controller (Southbridge). The chipset supports the current PC-100 SDRAM as well as DDR-SDRAM. In addition it also lends support to Ultra DMA/66 enhanced IDE devices. The rest of the features are pretty much the same with the Intel BX chipset.
OK, I hope I have not bored you with too much of technicalities. Let's get on to some benchmarking, shall we?
The Test
Currently, the only motherboard available in Singapore is Microstar's MS-6167 Slot-A motherboard. I have not seen any other brands in Singapore yet. The processor given to me was an Athlon K7 500 MHz version, although the markings on the package was for a 600MHz processor. (Hmm.. signs of re-marked CPUs in the market already? I guess not.) Anyway, there's no cause for panic as the processor is still a sample. I do hope when they do become commercially available, the markings would be correct.
In the tests, I used normal PC-100 Mitsubishi SDRAMs, rated at 8ns. In addition, an Ultra DMA/66 IDE hard disk was used (Deskstar 22GXP 13.5GB with 2MB cache). Two video cards were used for graphic comparison purposes. NVidia's TNT2-M64 chipset with 32MB of video memory (Microstar's MS8808) was used as well as 3dfx's Voodoo3 2000 with 16MB of video memory. All graphics benchmarks were ran using 16-bit color mode with the latest reference drivers from the respective chipset manufacturers. Processor tests were carried out in Windows 98 as well as Windows NT 4.0.
Test Configuration
Processor: AMD K7 Athlon 500MHz
(AMD-K7600MTR51B C)RAM: 1 x 128MB Mitsubishi PC100 SDRAM DIMM Hard Drive(s): IBM Deskstar 22GXP DJNA-371350 Video Card(s): Microstar's MS8808 NVidia TNT2-M64 (32MB)
3dfx Voodoo3 2000 (16MB)Bus Master Drivers: AMD-756 Bus Master v1.12RC Video Drivers: NVidia Reference Detonator Drivers 2.08 (Win98/NT)
3dfx Voodoo3 1.02.13 (Win98)Operation System(s): Windows 98 Second Edition (build 4.10.2222A)
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation (Service Pack 5)Ziff-Davis Benchmark Results
Type of Benchmark Windows 98 Windows NT 4.0 CPU mark 99 47.7 48.3 FPU Winmark 2710 2740 Business Winstone 99 v1.1 24.5 32.6 High-End Winstone 99 v1.1 - 30.4 Business Disk Winmark 99 4330 4610 High-End Disk Winmark 99 10400 10300
Comparing the benchmarks performed on the Athlon, I must say I am very impressed with the speed. Even without comparing it with the Pentium II/III, it is obvious that the scores are pretty high to begin with. However, the benchmark scores are surprisingly high in the Windows NT 4.0 tests. The Business Winstone 99 scored more than 30% higher as compared to Windows 98. This indicates that the Athlon is indeed a very serious piece of toy, not only for gamers and high-tech geeks, but also for serious computation. In order to make the benchmark scores more reasonable, I will compare the results with a Pentium III, but I will include the results in the MS-6167 motherboard review itself. Watch out for it.
Well, what about the UDMA/66 support? Is it comparable with other third party solutions, like Promise Technology's Ultra66 IDE controller? Let's compare it with my recent review of the Ultra66 IDE controller.
Hard disk controller benchmarks (Windows 98 FAT 32)
on-board UDMA/33
Promise (UDMA/66)
UW-SCSI
AMD-756 (UDMA/66)As you can see from the benchmark scores in Windows 98, the MS-6167 is way ahead of the competition in Business Disk Winmark. However, under the High-End Disk Winmark test, it failed to even stay competitive. The Adaptec Threadmark 2.0 data transfer rate tests showed that the MS-6167 is slightly slower than the Promise Ultra66 controller. However, it is still significantly faster than the normal UDMA/33 interface. As the bus master drivers are pretty new, I believe there are still room for improvement. The bus master drivers provided in AMD's web site is v1.11, but on the CD provided with the mainboard, it is v1.12. It is quite believable to say that the drivers are still immature as the driver revision changed in such a short span of time since its release.
Hard disk controller benchmarks (Windows NT 4.0 NTFS)
on-board controller (DMA on)
Promise (UDMA/33)
Promise (UDMA/66)
AMD-756 (UDMA/66)In Windows NT 4.0, the MS-6167 performed much better. Again, the Business Disk Winmark scores topped the competition with the High-End Disk Winmark scores behind the rest, although it is still quite comparable. The MS-6167 also topped the Adaptec Threadmark 2.0 data transfer test. Seems like the AMD Athlon is stronger in Windows NT 4.0 than in Windows 98. One wonders how it will eventually perform in Windows 2000.
The next round of scores involve the graphic cards. In the tests, I used the cheaper TNT2-M64 and 3dfx's Voodoo3 2000. Installing and using these video cards were simple and they were virtually problem free. This is good news to all you gamers out there. One thing to note though, as with all other non-Intel chipsets, you will need to install the AGP miniport driver provided by AMD. Otherwise, the AGP card will fail to work properly. Also to note that the AGP miniport driver is installed only in Windows 98. For Windows NT, you only need to install Service Pack 3 or above to add support for AGP cards. Well, without further ado, let's take a look at how well these cards performed with the Athlon. Again, I will only make comparison with the Pentium-III in the MS-6167 motherboard review. So, do stay tuned.
3D Mark 99 Max (Professional Edition) benchmark
Multi-Texturing (MTexels/s)
3-pass (fps)
2-pass (fps)
1-pass (fps)Here, it is apparent that the TNT2-M64 outperforms the Voodoo3 2000 at lower screen resolutions of 640x480. However, at higher screen resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768, the Voodoo3 2000 outshines the TNT2-M64. However, judging from the scores alone, we can already see that 3D graphic performance increased significantly due to the faster CPU. Also to note that both the NVidia and 3dfx drivers have been optimized for 3DNow! instructions and not the new enhanced 3DNow! instructions present on the Athlon. Perhaps future revisions may contain support for these new instructions. Let's quickly take a look at some Quake II/III benchmarks.
Quake II v3.20 benchmarks
Quake 3 Test v1.08 benchmarks
As you can see from the tables above, the scores between the TNT2-M64 and Voodoo3 2000 are pretty close to each other in Quake II. On the other hand, the Vooodoo3 2000 win hands down in the Quake3test benchmarks. Looks like the Voodoo3 may be a good choice as a low cost graphic card. Still, I doubt it will even be comparable with a TNT2 Ultra. But that will be another story.
As I have mentioned earlier, there doesn't seem to be any problems using either the TNT2 or Voodoo3 brand of cards. However, I did encounter a slight problem with the Voodoo3. Artifacts were generated when I started dragging files around in Windows Explorer, but everything was fine when running 3DMark99. So, I went into BIOS and disabled the AGP ISA aliasing, and this solved the problem. However, I did notice a slight decrease in 3D performance after disabling the AGP ISA aliasing feature, and the benchmark scores above are obtained with that feature disabled. Note that this didn't happen in the TNT2-M64 card. Hmmm... I should address this problem in the MS-6167 review, but oh, what the heck.
Well, there's really nothing bad about the processor. In fact, the only bad thing about the AMD Athlon K7 is that the availability is limited!! I do hope AMD will solve their yield problems soon and bring the processor into full volume production. Also, let's hope their Dresden fab in Germany will start with the 0.18µm core soon. That should really keep the Athlon at the top of the hill for a while.
Conclusion
It feels good to finally see some competition in the CPU arena. Intel is no longer the title holder for the fastest x86 CPU in the world. Looks like AMD is back in the CPU business and judging from the Athlon's performance, they do mean serious business. Although the processor is top notched, AMD do make it affordable and its pricing should be very competitive with Intel's latest Pentium-III processors. It will not be surprising to see Intel lower the prices of their processors in a bid to weed out the competition. On the other hand, I believe AMD should keep their focus on improving their yields, thus keeping the cost low enough to compete. As for the rest of us, we will just have to wait and hope that AMD will pull out of this difficult time. All AMD supporters, three cheers for AMD!!
Overall Rating (Out of a maximum of 5 Star) |
|
| Installation | ***** |
| Performance | ***** |
| Price | **** |
| Overclockability | N.A. |
| Material Quality | ***** |
| Stability | ***** |
| Overall Rating | ***** |
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