Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 14:03:53 03/12/00
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On March 11, 2000 at 09:01:19, Vincent Lejeune wrote: >>EV6 is both good and bad. Good for performance. bad for price. it is a 256 >>bit bus. Which is not cheap, from a memory point of view... >> >>Supposedly the athlon is pin-compatible with an alpha, at least that was the >>original promise, so the el-cheapo machine could be built based on the athlon, >>but when performance was needed, the athlon could be replaced with a real >>21264 (or higher) alpha chip to really go fast. > >The athlon is pin-compatible as promised but it is "not electrically compatible" >with the alpha processors , as it was said since the biginning of the >developpement of the Athlon. According this, there's NO motherboard where could >plug an athlon or a alpha, and I bet there will be not one, because the 2 >products don't target the same users : Ahtlon for home/office automation and >Alpha for workstations/research computers/university I was pretty sure that pin-compatible meant electrically compatible. Otherwise AMD wouldn't make such a big deal about having processors that are pin-compatible with Intel. The whole deal with the AMD 486, K5, etc. was that they could be dropped into Intel mobos. I was also pretty sure that one of the reasons why the Athlon uses the EV6 bus is to make EV6 hardware cheap, so Alpha systems would become cheaper, and people would buy lots of Alphas to upgrade their Athlons... -Tom
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