AMD Athlon User Manual

Introduction
Page 1-6
Mainboard Form-Factor
The board is designed with ATX form factor - the latest industry standard of
chassis. The ATX form factor is essentially a Baby-AT baseboard rotated 90
degrees within the chassis enclosure and a new mounting configuration for the
power supply. With these changes the processor is relocated away from the
expansion slots, allowing them all to hold full length add-in cards. ATX defines
a double height aperture to the rear of the chassis which can be used to host a
wide range of onboard I/O. Only the size and position of this aperture is
defined, allowing PC manufacturers to add new I/O features (e.g.; TV input, TV
output, joystick, modem, LAN, audio, etc.) to systems. This will help systems
integrators differentiate their products in the marketplace, and better meet your
needs.
 By integrating more I/O down onto the board and better positioning the
hard drive and floppy connectors material cost of cables and add-in cards is
reduced.
 By reducing the number of cables and components in the system, manufac-
turing time and inventory holding costs are reduced and reliability will
increase.
 By using an optimized power supply, it's possible to reduce cooling costs
and lower acoustical noise. An ATX power supply, which has a side-
mounted fan, allows direct cooling of the processor and add-in cards making
a secondary fan or active heatsink unnecessary in most system applications.
Expandable I/O
Figure 2: Summary of ATX chassis features
CPU
Single chassis fan
for system
Floppy / IDE
connectors
5 1/4"
Bay
3 1/2"
Bay
ATX
Power
Supply
PCI slots
AGP slot
ATX 12V power
connector
ATX power
connector

AMD Athlon Specifications

General

Microarchitecture	K7
Architecture	x86
Manufacturer	AMD
Core Count	1
Thread Count	1
Socket	Socket A
Manufacturing Process	180 nm
L1 Cache	128 KB (64 KB Instruction + 64 KB Data)
L2 Cache	64 KB to 512 KB
Clock Rate	500 MHz
FSB	100 MHz