Athlon Features/Overclocking

What's new

So what has AMD changed with the 1.1GHz Athlon? From the standpoint of the microarchitecture, absolutely nothing. The core voltage remains the same (1.75V), as does the system bus (100MHz DDR effectively operating at 200MHz). The only factor that's changed is the clock multiplier, now at 11.0x. Here's a quick summary of the features present in the new 1.1GHz Athlon core:

0.18-micron manufacturing process
37 million transistors on a 120mm^2 die
128K L1 cache, 256K full-speed L2 cache
200MHz system bus

AMD's CEO, W.J. Sanders III, has publicly stated that AMD plans to release faster Athlons every five to six weeks for the remainder of the year. AMD expects to hit 1.5GHz sometime during the first quarter of next year.

Besides boosting the clock speed, AMD also plans to improve system and memory bandwidth when they unveil their 760 chipset later this year. Offering a faster system bus (266MHz versus the standard 200MHz bus present on today's Athlons) and support for DDR SDRAM, 760 should offer a nice performance boost for AMD. In addition, AMD plans to add additional performance by offering processors with larger cache sizes.

Overclocking

The 1.1GHz Athlon sample we received from AMD had its multiplier locked, so we used a pencil to connect the L1 bridges on our CPU. We've included pictures to explain the technique:

In the first picture, the processors multiplier is unlocked, no medications to the L1 bridge are necessary. The second picture illustrates a processor with locked bridges.

View Full-Size in another window."> L1 Bridge connected -- unlocked CPU

View Full-Size in another window."> L1 Bridge unconnected -- locked CPU

The final picture is our 1.1GHz processor after we'd unlocked it by connecting the bridges.

View Full-Size in another window."> Pencil markings to connect the L1 bridges

For overclocking tests, we decided to use ABIT's KT7-RAID motherboard. With the KT7-RAID, the clock multiplier of the CPU and system bus can both be adjusted via SoftMenu III BIOS. This makes the KT7-RAID excellent for Socket A overclocking.

With the motherboard in place and the CPU installed, we were able to overclock our 1.1GHz Athlon to 1224MHz (12x102), the fastest clock speed we've ever achieved with any processor.

To change things up a bit, we'll start with a gaming benchmark -- MDK2.