AMD Athlon 64-Bit CPUs Explained

Side-by-side glimpse 
To give a better comparison of the processors, I've created a table based off of information provided by AMD's technical website. For reference, I've added some information regarding the Athlon XP, Pentium IV, and Pentium IV Extreme Edition (EE). Since this is primarily to compare the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX, some of the information for the other processors is not available.

	Athlon 64	Athlon 64 FX	Athlon XP	Pentium IV	Pentium IV EE
Architecture:	K8	K8	K7	--	--
Architure Introduction:	2003	2003	2001?	2000	2003
Interface:	Socket 754	Socket 940	Socket A (462)	Socket 478	Socket 478
Number of transistors:	105.9 Mil	105.9 Mil	54.3 Mil	55 Mil	169 Mil
Manufacturing technique:	0.13 Micron, SOI	0.13 Micron, SOI	0.13 Micron	0.13 Micron	0.13 Micron
CPU core's surface:	193 mm2	193 mm2	101 mm2	146 mm2	--
System bus:	HyperTransport	HyperTransport	Front Side Bus	Front Side Bus @ 800 Mhz, 533 Mhz Half-duplex	Front Side Bus @ 800 Mhz Half-duplex
32-bit instruction support:	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
64-bit instruction support:	Yes, AMD64 tech.	Yes, AMD64 tech.	No	No	No
Integrated memory controller:	Singlechannel 64-bit	Dualchannel 128-bit	No, device logic integrated on motherboard	No, device logic integrated on motherboard	No, device logic integrated on motherboard
Bus bandwidth:	6.4 GB/s	6.4 GB/s	--	6.4 GB/s	6.4 GB/s
Integrated north bridge:	Yes, 128-bit wide databus @ CPU clock frequency	Yes, 128-bit wide databus @ CPU clock frequency	No	No	NO
Pipeline length:	12	12	10	--	--
L1 Cache Size	128 KB	128 KB	128 KB	12K µop trace + 8KB data	12K µop trace + 8KB data
L2 Cache Size	1 MB	1 MB	512 KB	512 KB	512 KB
L3 Cache Size	--	--	--	--	2MB
3D and multimedia instructions:	3DNow!, SSE, SSE2	3DNow!, SSE, SSE2	3DNow!, SSE	SSE, SSE2	SSE, SSE2

 

Conclusion
Well, that's about it. Hope this little article will be of some use to those with questions about the AMD 64 processors. I'm sure that there will still be more questions about the processors in the future, so don't forget to check out our CPU forum or our IRC Channel for the latest information and discussion on the AMD64.

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