The New Athlon Processor: AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel

Block Diagrams

For illustration purposes I'm offering you the block diagram of Athlon as well as Pentium III. Please refer to those diagrams to make following my explanations a bit easier.

Glossary:
AGU: Address Generation Unit
IEU: Integer Execution Unit
SSE: Intel's Streaming SIMD Extensions Execution Unit
BTB: Branch Target Buffer
BHB: Branch History Buffer

This is a die picture of the Pentium III die, which is not the same scale as the Athlon die-picture; the Athlon die is larger. The Pentium III (Katmai) is also manufactured in 0.25µ technology and it consists of 9.5 million transistors. Here you'll find some more facts .