Fast Performance

Athlon 600MHz General Specs

• Physical Interface: 242-contact Slot-A
• Bus Interface: Alpha EV6 200MHz
• Speed: 600MHz
• Number of transistors: 22 million
• Multiplier: 3x
• L1 Cache: 128KB Internal
• L2 Cache: 512KB Internal
• L2 Speed: ½ core speed (300MHz SRAM)

Whatever happened to RISC?

When PowerPC first launched with the 601 processor, RISC (reduced instruction set computing) was the word of the day. Ambiguous charts measuring "CPU speed" showed Intel's contemporary CISC architecture plateauing and trailing off, as RISC (specifically, PPC RISC) slowly gains momentum, and then skyrockets almost exponentially into the wild blue yonder of unimaginable computing speed.

Well, several years later, it looks like Intel still holds the speed crown, and talk of RISC in the everyday industry has all but died (the big processor paradigm acronyms nowadays are "VLIW" and "EPIC," regarding Intel's 64-bit Merced processor). Well, RISC is certainly far from dead. What's happened (at least in the x86 world) is more of an amalgamation of RISC/CISC technology. While it would be near-impossible to move completely from Intel's well-rooted CISC origins, the benefits of RISC technology have slowly been making their way into IA-32 processors over time.

Some will remember NexGen, who had created a Pentium competitor in the Nx586, which got its speed boost by decoding x86 CISC instructions into pared down, equivalent RISC instructions. It was for this processor architecture and expertise that AMD purchased NexGen in 1997, and the culmination of their joint work can be seen in the Athlon's design.