The New Athlon Processor: AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel

System Bus

One thing shouldn't be forgotten however. Getting EV6 up to 200 MHz won't be an easy thing to do. We known that many motherboard makers are currently having a hard time with Intel's Camino chipset, which is also running very high speeds (up to 400 MHz) on the motherboard. Implementing 200 MHz CPU-to-Chipset lines on a motherboard make the board design pretty complicated as well. Things get worse for multi processor systems. We've learned that EV6 is a point-to-point protocol and this means that each processor is connected to the chipset with its own 140 lines. This condition is already quite tough for dual or quad processor motherboards and it will get even worse if those x times 140 lines are even running at a 200 MHz clock.

I'd still say that the bus technology obviously rocks, which makes sure that Athlon gains performance advantage point No. 7.