A powerfull and popular creation by AMD which was launched on June 5, 2000. It saw daylight in slot A and socket A packages and it's final version ran up to 1400MHz. The 'Thunderbird' surpassed the predecessor by implementing on-die full speed L2-cache, which is a lot faster than off-die half speed (or even one-third) L2-cache. Intel did the same trick with the Pentium III, which also gained a speedbump. Besides implementing full-speed cache, AMD also used an exclusive cache design. This combines L1 and L2-cache, of which L1-cache is the fastest. The Athlon has a big L1-cache which is good for performance. |