MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science EECS Event

Beyond Athlon: What Next from AMD?

Dirk Meyer
Advanced Micro Devices

Tuesday, October 3, 2000
4:00 PM (refreshments 3:30)
Edgerton Hall, Room 34-101
MTL VLSI Seminar

Abstract

AMD launched Athlon, its 7th generation PC processor, in June of 1999. It quickly established itself as one of the highest performance PC processors in the market. Over the past year, several derivative processors were launched including Duron which have both increased the performance of the Athlon and brought the 7th generation core to the value segment of the PC marketplace.

The speaker will describe the microarchitectural and technology enhancements made to the Athlon processor core since its introduction last year, which together have kept this product on the leading edge of processor performance. In addition, the speaker will describe the Lighting Data Transport (LDT) protocol, a high speed ( 1 > GHz) chip-to-chip interconnect which will debut in AMD platforms next year. Finally, the speaker will compare and contrast AMD's approach to 64-bit computing with other approaches in the industry.