Athlon 700

Internally, the Athlon 700 CPU remains unchanged versus the earlier Athlon CPUs, which all contain the fresh-from-the-ground-up K7 core design.

We mentioned the Athlon's core in our earlier reviews of the line, particularly mentioning its strong FPU:

"Thanks to a complete rethink of the way floating point operations should be handled, combined with a virtually limitless engineering mandate to create a fully new design from the ground up, the Athlon offers the world's first pipelined and superscalar floating point unit.

Because of this, the FPU on the Athlon CPUs can simultaneously support up to three multimedia or floating point instructions at one time, versus a single instruction on a competitor's FPU."

The dividends of the Athlon's strong FPU continue to pay out today as more 3D applications arrive on the market that require a strong degree of geometry acceleration and hence, can take advantage of any benefits the Athlon's FPU design provides.

As support for AMD's SIMD instruction set known as 3DNow! increases, and the possibility for Athlon-optimized software designed to utilize the CPU's large L1 cache arrive next year, the performance aspect of the Athlon line is all but guaranteed.

As with our earlier Athlon CPU reviews, we utilized an AMD-provided Viper 750 reference mainboard for the performance measurement aspect of the Athlon 700, which is the chip/board design most third party Athlon mainboard vendors have duplicated for the first generation boards.