AMD Athlon™ Processor
Competitive Comparison*
Processor Architecture/Technology--Competitive Comparison
† While all AMD Athlon processors
currently being manufactured by AMD feature 256K of full-speed, on-die L2
cache memory, previous versions, without on-die L2 cache, may still be
commercially available in some computer systems.
| Feature |
AMD Athlon™ Processor |
Pentium® III |
Pentium® 4 |
| Operations per clock cycle |
9 |
5 |
6 |
| Integer pipelines |
3 |
2 |
4 |
| Floating point pipelines |
3 |
1 |
2 |
| Full x86 decoders |
3 |
1 |
1 |
| L1 cache size |
128KB |
32KB |
12k µop + 8KB Data Cache |
| L2 cache size |
256KB on-chip † |
256KB on-chip |
256KB on-chip |
| Total on-chip full-speed cache |
384KB |
288KB |
264KB + 12k µop |
| Total effective on-chip full-speed cache |
384KB
(exclusive) |
256KB
(inclusive) |
256KB - 12k µop
(inclusive) |
| System bus speed |
200 MHz to 266MHz |
100MHz or 133MHz |
400MHz |
| 3D enhancement instructions |
Enhanced 3DNow!™ |
SSE |
SSE2 |
| Single-precision FP SIMD |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| 4 FP operations per clock |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Cache/prefetch controls |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Streaming controls |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| DSP/comm extensions |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
|