The Test Platforms
AMD's Corona Reference Platform
AMD supplied us, as many others, with a test system sporting AMD's own 'Corona' 760-refernce board and a 1200/133 MHz Athlon processor. Unfortunately the setting for 100 MHz FSB would not work on this board and in the shortness of the time we were also not able to find a way of changing the CPU's clock multiplier. This left us with only one test setting, the predefined 1200/133 MHz setting. The DDR-memory that came with the board was CL 2.5 DDR SDRAM from Micron, which we exchanged with Micron CL2 DDR SDRAM. This had a major performance impact. We also tested several other DDR-SDRAM DIMMs in this platform, but Micron's memory turned out to be the fastest. The 'Corona'-board worked reliably even without a lime and you will see that the performance was rather impressive in most of our tests.
