What's Quantispeed Architecture?

[Tipycol]

Well I was looking in the ads this morning and read the comp sections. They were advertising Athlon XP's, then it said they have Quantispeed Architecture. This made me think of a P4, cause of the 4 pipelines, but I know that's not it. So what is it and why do they advertise it?

 

[minoukat]

quantispeed is just saying that the athlon is fast. It's nothing, just some marketing idea to help sell more (busting out the good things of the product to impress the buyer)

 

[Tipycol]

So it's just some term to try to convince people that MHz isn't everything...I don't quite think it's working

 

[Valk]

but mhz ISNT everything. I think somone summed up the benefits of RISC vs CISC already on this forums. If you didnt read that post it says that a P4 based ont he CISC instruction set can perform 6 instructions per clock where the athlon on RISC can do 9. not sure who braught that out but thanks.
this makes the athlon sizably more powerful alone. the only real benefit to p4 is its 256 bit memory interface. I belive the athlon only has 64bit which leaves the p4 WIDE open to accept mad crazy memory types that arent currently available.

 

[Tipycol]

I know it's not everything, but I don't think some guy that doesn't know anything about computers and sees a P4 rated at 2.4GHz or a XP 2.0GHz 2400+ and has Quantispeed Architecture is gonna go for the XP. He probably just sees the numbers as one being larger than the other and that the XP just has a lot of words under it's 1.8GHz, and goes for the P4

 

[Goo Kenson]

Even if they didn't mention that an XP is lower than it's name, people would go Intel over AMD just because Intel is the bigger name.

 

[Tipycol]

Yeah well...we own a few Intel chips...so AMDme

 

[MameXP]

well as i remember, Quantispeed Architecture generally speaking is:
1. Hardware data prefetch
2. Exclusive & speculative Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLB).
3 .Superscalar micro-architecture.
4. Superscalar, fully pipelined Floating Point Unit (FPU).

All of those would speed up athlon processors and thats why XP beats Intel until 2.53 northwood came out.
I hope it helps.
p/s you can go to AMD home page to check its technical docs, you may find them over your head if you're not in hardware engineering.

 

[MameXP]

Just onething, we call it Digital Hardware in our university
cheers

 

[Tipycol]

Yeah I don't exactly understand what they mean, but at least now I know what Quantispeed Architecture represents

Thanks

Tipycol