Introduction

AMD has continued to consolidate and demonstrate its leadership with the release of the AMD-760 chipset for AMD Athlon processors, supporting the new and evolutionary Double Data Rate (DDR) Synchronous (SDRAM), commonly know to us as DDR SDRAM. DDR SDRAM is a new memory technology that offers peak memory bandwidths up to 2.1GB/sec, and comes in two flavours PC-1600 and PC-2100. The AMD-760 chipset has additional features which clearly make it stand out from the crowd; Ultra-DMA 100 support with downward compatibility for all existing Ultra-DMA 33/66 devices such as CD-ROMs, DVD-ROM, with total support for high-bandwidth Ultra-DMA 100 devices allowing peak transfer rates, without the normal bottleneck found in older devices. The latest and greatest 266MHz Front Side Bus (FSB), this increases from 200MHz, and we hear you all gasping what! then happens to our current Athlon 200MHz FSB processor?, simple AMD has ensured the backward compatibility of the processor, and hence can be utilised without undue worry. Increasing the FSB was a natural progression once the new DDR support was included, along with 4x AGP and Ultra-DMA 100 the obvious bottlenecks have been removed for a top-notch performance based platform. We analysis the new DDR SDRAM and the AMD-760 chipset combination to establish, whether this will be the platform for 2001. Currently AMD offer a 1.2GHz, 1.13GHz and 1GHz 266MHz front side bus Athlon processors.

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