The
system bus interface watches for reads and writes on the bus, and looks up each address in the secondary cache.
As expected, the Pentium 4 chip supports a 400 MHz
system bus, surpassing--for the moment, anyway--the AMD Athlon bus speed.
The new
system bus, Lightning Data Transport, will offer a 20 times increase in bandwidth for I/O, co-processing and multi- processing functions, improving overall systems performance, said AMD.
Its Pentium III Coppermine chips will run at up to 700MHz and will support a 133MHz
system bus. They are expected to ship on October 25.
The processor is built on Intel's 0.13-micron process technology and features a 512KB Level 2 cache, a 2MB Level 3 cache and an 800 MHz
system bus speed.
An additional set of 144 new SIMD instructions (called SIMD2) will accelerate video, and the chip will take advantage of Intel's new 400MHz
system bus. The chip will use dual-channel RDRAM from Rambus.
Prelude uses a new
system bus designed to support PA- RISC and IA-64 which the company has previously referred to as Stretch.
The processor can be used in both desktop and mobile PCs and is based on Intel's 0.13-micron process technology with 478-pin packaging and a 400MHz
system bus.
As a rule, the less processing of data that is done on the software side, the higher the possible throughput will be because fewer clock cycles will be required to get the data ready to send through the
system bus.
Companion chips access the host processor through the
system bus with no glue logic, and are a quicker method of extending functionality than the ideal full-scale integration on a single chip.