Tuesday, March 25, 2003
AMD is planning to improve the performance of its flagship PC processor in the next few weeks, boosting the Athlon system performance.
A key feature of the new chip is expected to be a faster front-side bus, the data channel that controls how quickly the chip can communicate with memory.
Increasing the bus speed from 333MHz to 400MHz, as AMD is expected to do, should mean a significant improvement in the overall performance of Athlon XP-based computers.
SiS and Via, two major chipset makers for AMD processors, are both talking up their plans to support an Athlon XP 400MHz front-side bus. SiS debuted the SiS748 chipset with 400MHz FSB support at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover earlier this month.
A chipset allows the PC processor to communicate with other PC components such as memory and peripherals.
Via recently launched its KT400A chipset as a broadside against Nvidia, whose Athlon-compatible nForce2 chipsets have recently proven popular enough to eat into Via's market share. "We get a lot of revenue and profit from Socket A (AMD) chipsets, and this is the first time we have ever had a real competitor in this area," said Via spokesman James Campbell. "Now it's important for us to get performance parity and surpass them."
Campbell said that the KT400A could be easily converted to use the upcoming Athlon XP's 400MHz FSB, a feature which he said was likely to come along shortly. "We might have to tape out the chipset again to work with the 400MHz FSB," he said, adding that this was a simple process.
AMD is looking for ways to improve the performance of the Athlon XP to remain competitive with the Pentium 4 until the delayed arrival of the Athlon64, a desktop chip based on the same technology as the Opteron. The Athlon64 is to arrive in September.
By: DocMemory
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