Competitive Comparison AMD Athlon™ Processors 

Features

AMD Athlon™ Processor

Pentium^® 4

Architecture Introduction

2006

2000

Infrastructure

Socket AM2

Socket LGA775

Process Technology

90 nanometer, SOI
65 nanometer, SOI

90 nanometer

Number of Transistors

90nm: 164million
65nm: 122million

125 Million

64-bit Instruction Set Support

Yes,
AMD64 technology

Depends, EM64T on some Pentium^® 4 series

Enhanced Virus Protection for Windows^® XP SP2*

Yes

Depends

System Bus Technology

HyperTransport™ Technology up to 2000MHz
Full duplex

Front Side Bus up to 1066 MHz,
Half duplex

Integrated DDR Memory Controller (MCT)

128-bit + 16-bit ECC
unbuffered PC2 6400 (DDR2-800), PC2 5300(DDR2-667), PC2 4200(DDR2-533), PC2 3200(DDR2-400)

No,
Discrete logic device on motherboard

Total Processor-to-System Bandwidth

HyperTransport: up to 8.0 GB/s
Memory bandwidth: up to 10.6 GB/s
Total: up to 18.6 GB/s

Total: up to 8.5 GB/s

Integrated Northbridge

Yes,
128-bit data path @ CPU core frequency

No,
Discrete logic device on motherboard

High-Performance, On-chip Cache

L1: 128KB
L2: 512k or 1MB

L1: 12K µop trace + 8KB data
L2: up to 2MB

3D and Multimedia Instructions

3DNow!™ Professional technology, SSE2, SSE3

SSE, SSE2, SSE3