The Original AMD's Goliath.....
Channel: Tech. Inc
Date: 2019-07-06

With All the Hype around Ryzen 2, We tend to forget the actual Goliath series of processors, the Athlon,  and within that, we are gonna talk about the processor that started this series. The Athlon Classic
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Video Transcript:

We know that the Zen 2 is getting released now and getting new performance upgrades, beating it's rivalry to it's grave. but we tend
to forget the original Goliath from AMD, the Athlon series and within this we are going to see the processor that started this
 series. The Athlon Classic


The Athlon had a  64 kilobyte L1cache and an 512 KB L2 cache. 
it supported MMX and 3DNow and ran anywhere around  500–700 MHz for the K7, and  550–1000 MHz for the K75


The Original Athlon also known as the Athlon Classic was released on June 23rd of 1999. It belonged to the  seventh-generation of amd's processors
 and used a new architecture that increased IPC considerably and allowed AMD to push the clock rates up to 1 GHz.

Previously Amd's Floating point performance lagged way behind it's Intel counterparts, however with the Athlon the processor was equipped with an exceedingly powerful triple-issue out-of-order FPU that surpassed Intel's competing processors.
Athlon was compatible with the new DDR RAM, which featured greater bandwidth and performance compared to traditional SDRAM.


All of this meant that the Athlon was 10% faster than the Pentium III at the same clock for Business applications, and even faster (~20%) for gaming workloads. 


But the Athlon wasn't all sunshine and ponies. It too had several problems. The Athlon classic had a cartridge based design, meaning the CPU was 
packaged as a rectangular 'cartridge' that needs to be inserted vertically just like a RAM module.AMD used separate RAM chips soldered
 onto the same package as the CPU. This enabled AMD to install larger amounts of L2, but the cache ran at lower clock speeds.

This helped cutting the costs of the processor as a similar amount of on die L2 cache would cost exponentially more than
this. However the Ram modules were incapable of keeping up with the processor's clock speed as they were farther away from an supposedly on die L2 cache.
There were many revisions for this design, however it was clear on later designs of processors that this way of caching is incapable of matching with the processor

The processors were also multiplier-locked, meaning they cannot be over clocked. This was the first time AMD had done this as resellers are just changing the 
clock speeds of older processors and selling it at a price premium. These processors were not stable and crashed frequently and AMD was getting it's reputation damaged
hence to protect the reputation the company made the processors multiplier locked


Commercially, the Athlon "Classic" was an enormous success.One reason being that Intel suffering from a  series of major production,
 design, and quality control issues at the time. This made the market free for AMD to take.


The Adm Athlon Thunderbird was Amd's response to the lackluster  L2 cache performance which was hampering CPU performance.
The Classic processor was later succeeded by the Athlon Thunderbird and K8 processors, 
These processors had the L2 cache integrated directly onto the CPU die. Though the L2 cache size was cut in half, it ran at the same speed as the CPU, drastically improving performance. 
Other than the on die L2 cache, the thunder bird and subsequent models had gradual performance boosts over time