At its introduction, the AMD Athlon™ processor marked the arrival of the world's first seventh-generation microarchitecture and in doing so set a new performance standard for x86 processors. Among the processor's award-winning architectural features are a revolutionary 200MHz, 1.6Gbytes/sec system bus, a fully pipelined, superscalar floating point engine, and an enhanced version of AMD's 3DNow!™ technology. Additionally, the processor offers 128KB of L1 cache--four times the L1 cache of competing x86 processors--along with a 512KB external backside L2 cache running at up to half the speed of the processor core.

With new versions of the AMD Athlon processor, however, AMD has improved overall system performance by integrating the processor's L2 cache directly onto the processor die. This white paper describes the benefits of utilizing the AMD Athlon processor with full-speed on-die L2 cache.

The new AMD Athlon processor boasts three times the full-speed on-die cache of previous AMD Athlon processors. The new processor features 128KB of L1 cache--plus 256KB of full-speed, on-die L2 cache--for a total internal system cache of 384KB.