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AMD recognized the need for a new architecture upon the release of Intel's Pentium III platform. The K6-2 had remained the mainstay for AMD throughout the reign of the Pentium II, but it could not rise to P3 standards. Instead of developing another K6-based revision, AMD undertook the arduous task of engineering a completely new design. Upon its release, the Athlon (K7) rapidly became the new choice for performance computing. The Athlon product series performs by raw power, featuring parallel execution for improved efficiency.
The transition to a new motherboard bus architecture paved the way for the Athlon's impressive success. The K7 interface is based on Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha EV6 architecture. The Alpha processor is actually a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC), while the Athlon is a traditional 32-bit x86 offering. Using an off-the-shelf motherboard allowed AMD to concentrate its engineering efforts on the processor core itself. The resulting K7 Athlon core still lies at the heart of AMD's desktop computers, despite revisions to integrate on-die cache and extension set improvements.
The EV6 motherboard architecture eliminates the standard front-side bus approach by separating each relevant system bus. Buses are still interlinked through a base timing configuration for deriving transfer rates. The processor bus operates in a double-data-rate (DDR) mode that transfers information on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal. Other buses can operate as usual, though the latest Athlon architectural revisions have expanded the DDR signaling technique to the memory bus. DDR timing rates can be confusing. Remember that the base frequency is simply one-half the effective MHz frequency. For current Athlon systems 200, 266, and 66 MHz effective frequencies yield base frequencies of 100, 133, and 33 MHz, respectively.
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