AMD’s Pentium 3 Killer: Happy Birthday Athlon (PCGH Retro, June 23)

…1971: Who doesn’t know it, the File Transfer Protocol. On June 23, an RFC circular number 172 from the US University Networking Working Group submitted a final draft for discussion, which was accepted. The FTP was born.

The circular begins as follows:

The file transfer protocol (FTP) is a user-level protocol for file transfer between host computers (including terminal IMP’s), on the ARPAcomputer network. The primary function of FTP is to facilitate transfer of files between hosts, and to allow convenient use of storage and file handling capabilities of other hosts. FTP uses the data transfer protocol described in RFC 171 to achieve transfer of data. This paperassumes knowledge of RFC 171. The objectives of FTP are to promote sharing of files (computer programs and/or data), encourage indirect use (without login orimplicit) of computers, and shield the user from variations in file and storage systems of different hosts, to the extent it is practical. These objectives are achieved by specifying a standard file transfer socket and initial connection protocol for indirect use, and using standard conventions for file transfer and related operations.

Before the Internet was made available, even “invented”, the most important US universities and research institutions were connected by the Internet’s forerunner ARPA-Net – hence the special mention of this network. FTP was thus created to encourage file sharing, although not in the context in which file sharing is most commonly used today.

…1991: Sega should be familiar to most video gamers in one form or another. And the figurehead, the cute porcupine “Sonic”, aka Sonic the Hedgehog, is certainly not an unknown quantity. This June 23rd will be loud Official Sega Blog Celebrated Sonic’s birthday. So from us too: Happy Birthday, little Sonic!

…1999: AMD became big with replicas of popular Intel processors, known for the K6 model – a notable success that was on a par with Intel’s Pentium CPUs in many respects and was cheaper at the same time. With the K6 and its further developments K6-2 and K6-III, AMD recently significantly extended the life of the Socket 7 platform, when Intel had long since abandoned it with the Pentium II in favor of the Slot 1 format. But now it’s time for a successor to the graying K6 architecture: the K7.

For the first time since the K5, the K7 is a completely separate architecture, developed by a team behind future AMD CEO Dirk Meyer, who previously designed the Alpha processor at DEC. The new processor has copper connections for the first time and should be ready for very high clock frequencies, initially with 500 to 600 MHz. AMD has learned from the FPU weakness of the predecessors and has given the K7 three FPU pipelines, the K7 also gets a triple decoder, even more L1 cache than the K6 and a completely new infrastructure borrowed from the DEC Alpha with a front side -Bus in double data rate procedure (EV6 protocol). Technically, then, the K7 is a worthy opponent for Intel, which this June 23 officially presented and delivered to the PC manufacturers – not as a K7, however, but under a new name: “Athlon”.

New strength, new problems
The Athlon should not only conquer the performance crown on the market of x86 processors, but also establish an independent, AMD-exclusive platform for the first time: the Slot A. But the mainboard manufacturers were initially hesitant – as it later became known, also under pressure from intel. While AMD can finally deliver a processor quickly and without significant production problems, there are hardly any mainboards available for the Athlon. In addition, the K7 requires unusually powerful power supplies and cooling solutions; As with previous AMD processors, stability problems are the result, which, however, are not to be blamed on the processor itself. In the first comparison tests, however, the Athlon is convincing right from the start and makes short work of the Pentium III “Katmai” – it takes six months before Intel can deliver a halfway comparable competitor’s product with the Pentium III “Coppermine”.

Gigahertz and beyond
In this constellation, AMD and Intel will soon set out on the legendary gigahertz race. The fall of the 1,000 MHz mark is a matter of prestige that even the non-specialist press picked up on, and which AMD won in 2000 with the K75, the first expansion stage of the K7. In the following months, AMD has the upper hand. Intel’s first stage of liberation with the Pentium 4 “Willamette” did not follow until 2001 and initially came to nothing due to the poorer per-clock performance of the Netburst architecture used. Thanks to the fast floating-point unit of the K75, AMD gained an excellent reputation during this time, especially among gamers. The Slot-A-Athlon is followed by the switch to Socket A, which is cheaper to produce, because the L2 cache – previously housed as a separate SRAM chip on the slot card – can soon be returned to the CPU core thanks to a die shrink hike: The Thunderbird is born.

Since Intel relies on high clock frequencies at the expense of per-clock performance with the Pentium 4, AMD picks up the performance rating of the K5 again. The marketing experts are naming the Athlon XP processors, which have been further developed with larger TLBs, data prefetching and SSE, “Palomino” after a new process, such as the Athlon XP 1500+ with 1,333 MHz. Officially, this model rating is always based on the old Thunderbird core, unofficially the reference to the Pentium 4 should of course be established. However, the real Pentium 4 opponent is yet to come: the K8 aka Athlon 64. It’s another big hit and will give AMD more years of technical superiority. Nevertheless, it is the K7 that finally establishes AMD as an equal opponent for Intel. Congratulations, Atlon!

In line with the topic, we also recommend the PCGH article The most important CPUs from AMD and 40 years of AMD: Milestones in CPU production.