tailieunhanh - A complete illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware phần 8

Thunderbird là một chip rất mạnh mẽ với 37 triệu bóng bán dẫn. Nó cạnh tranh trực tiếp vớiCPU làm việc tại một nửa hoặc mộ phần ba của bộ vi xử lý xung nhịp. Tích hợp bộ nhớ cache L2 vớibộ xử lý, 256 KB được truy cập ở tốc độ bộ vi xử lý đầy đủ, như nó phải. | An illustrated Guide AMD K7 Athlon. Both copper and aluminium chips available. The Thunderbird is a very powerful chip with its 37 million transistors. It competes directly with the Pentium III Cumine . The old Athlon design using a Slot A-based cartridge suffered from poor L2 cache performance. The 512 KB of L2 cache was placed outside the CPU. This gave a connection to the CPU working at only a half or a third of the processors clockspeed. Integrating the L2 cache with the processor the 256 KB is accessed at full processor speed as it should. On-die cache gives the best performance. The reduction in the L2 size from 512 to 256 KB is of less importance the full clockspeed has an enormous effect. The Thunderbird chip performs just as good as or slightly better than Pentium III running at the same clock frequencies. With the new on-die L2 cache of 256 KB in combination with the original 128 KB L1 cache AMD indeed has a very powerful product. Narrow L2 cache to CPU pipeline Still Pentium III Cumine has one advantage to the Thunderbird. When Intel decided to integrate the 256 KB of L2 cache with the processor they gave it a 256 bit wide bus to work with. When the L2 resides outside the CPU you have to stick to a 64 bit bus between CPU and L2. This restriction comes from the number of CPU pins you want to allocate to the L2 connection. If the L2 cache is integrated with the CPU there is no need for this limitation. Intel wisely went from 64 to 256 bits width. This AMD has not done. For some reason the Thunderbird core still only connect to the L2 cache on a 64 bit wide bus. Copper or alu The new Thunderbirds are being produced two fabs At fab25 in Austin Texas micron aluminium At fab30 in Dresden Germany micron copper AMD told that there should be no difference between the two chips. Copper is the most sophisticated material since it opens up for much higher clock frequencies than aluminium due to the better electrical conduit. However at sub-GigaHertz .