Until the surprise announcement last week by AMD that a 650MHz Athlon CPU would be ready for delivery to OEM system integrators in early September (AMD's resellers get the 650 sometime afterward) the top of the line model was the 600MHz unit we're reviewing today.
Street priced between $620 and $680 depending upon where you purchase it, the Athlon 600 CPU serves as a competitive gap filler between the $500 Athlon 550 and the $850 Athlon 650.
As with the rest of the initial launch of Athlon CPUs, the 600MHz model runs on a 100MHz front side bus and utilizes normal PC-100 SDRAM.
Early Athlon motherboards from six different OEM mainboard vendors (ASUS, Gigabyte, FIC, MSI, GVC, and Biostar) will be available at different points throughout the next three to four months. They will be powered by third party AGP 2X core logic chipsets from VIA, Ali, and SiS which are based on the reference design 750 chipset from AMD themselves. Sharky Extreme's Athlon evaluation PC was sent to us equipped with an AMD produced mainboard featuring the 750 chipset.
AMD has assured us that the performance level of their 750 chipset, and the AMD mainboard it's mounted are indicative of the true performance level of both the Athlon CPU and the upcoming third party mainboard chipsets.
Here's a feature run down on the AMD 750, which gives a look at what the aftermarket chipsets from VIA, Ali, and SiS will offer:
- 200MHz host bus
- AGP 2X
- PC-100 SDRAM support
- PCI 2.2 compliant
- ECC support
- UDMA/66 on board support
- 4-port OHCI USB
- APM 1.2 compliant
- PCI-ISA bridge
- Plug and Play support
Future features such as AGP 4X and PC-133 SDRAM support will have to wait until VIA, ALi, and SiS implement their own second generation versions of the AMD-750 chipset, which will happen sometime over the next four to eight months.
AMD has said repeatedly that they have no intention at the current time of being the sole supplier of the mainboard core logic sets that host their CPUs (as Intel virtually is), due to the heavy production costs of such a move.