AMD Athlon Intro Dinner
Written: 8/17/99
Written By: Moto®
Here I am on a beautiful Tuesday evening sitting in the
lobby of the Hilton hotel in Richmond when I could have gone to half price movie night.
I'm at the Hilton to see an introduction of AMD's new Athlon processor, and for the free
food (they served chicken).
The Athlon processor is AMD's newest and fastest CPU.
Clock speed for clock speed it's faster than Intel's Pentium 3. I got an up close look at
the Athlon 550 that was on display at the intro. My first impression was that heatsink was
nice and big but that fan on it sure is small.
While everyone was eating dinner I decided to go up and
take another look. Checking through the list of programs I noticed that Quake 2 was
installed! Being my ever nosey self I fired up the game and decided to run a quick
timedemo while no one was looking. What I didn't count on was the computer being hooked up
to some very BIG speakers. I think I made some people spilled drinks on themselves.
Unfortunately, the demo Athlon system had some cheap
ass ATI video card installed without working GL drivers. Quake 2 ran in software mode. I
think it did 25 frame per second. I didn't get a chance to find out what resolution or
options were turn on. The AMD guys seem kinda upset with me too, as they told me to go
back to my table.
The presentation lasted 90 minutes. Most of it was
dealing with what makes the Athlon so fast and what you can expect from the CPU with
different applications. I also got to find out how the name Athlon came to being.
AMD didn't want to call their new chip K7. They wanted
a name like what Intel had done with the Pentium. They wanted a name to project a sense of
speed and power and fitness. The Athlon comes from the word decathlon. You know, those 10
events in the Olympic where the winner is declared the fittest person on Earth? Athlon!
:-)
After the presentation, there was a question and answer
period. There was only one question I wanted answered, "Are there any locks on the
Athlon?". To which the speaker replied "Locks???"
"Ya! Locks! You know, bus locks, multiplier locks.
That kind of locks." To which the speaker replied softly "Oh...........You mean
.....*clearing throat* overclocking?"
The AMD spokesman stated that shipping Athlons will not
be locked in any way shape or form. You can overclock to your heart's content. However, I
read over at AnandTech that to
overclock it, you will have to take the CPU apart and use a controller module on it. This
module will allow you to change the multiplier settings of the CPU. No word on where to
get this controller module however. I'll find out if the CPU needs a module when I test
the retail Athlon.
The Introduction ended with a drawing for an Athlon
550, which I didn't win. :( However I did come out of there with with a nice Athlon
T-Shirt. I guess that was worth missing cheap movie night for. :-)
Look for The Tech Zone's review of the AMD Athlon
processor soon. We will try to.....*clearing throat*...overclock it of course.
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