Manufacturer

AMD

Type

Processor

Price

$440-$533

Availability

Now

Introduction


AMD has seen much success with their venerable line of K7 processors. Instead of following in Intel’s steps, their labours were used in becoming an industry leader, as well as innovator, rather than being a follower. With this came the ground-breaking technology in the Athlon, which till this date is still the most successful line of microprocessors. Home and Enterprise level consumers celebrated at the considerable dent it made to Intel’s market share. AMD revealed development of their newest line called the “Hammer” or K8 during the Microprocessor Forum about two years ago and this next generation processor architecture was long awaited and this last summer, consumers saw the introduction of the Opteron, AMD's x86-86 architecture. A high level of competition for Intel’s Pentium can only result in better technology and faster designs, with lower prices. Hot on the heels of the introduction of the Athlon 64 line early this fall, AMD is now ready to release a new stepping to their Athlon64 line, the 3400+.


Now that the New Year has rung in, AMD has a new processor for us. Building off of its Athlon64 architecture, AMD releases a 3400+ variant of their 64 bit line up. Previous lower clocked Athlon64 processors are starting to become readily available on the open market, and the 3400+ is available now. This processor is going to be the top of the line processor available in the Athlon64 category offering a 2.2GHz clock speed as well as the 1MB L2 cache, not to mention other added features such as Cool N’ Quiet that the Athlon64 architecture supports.

There aren’t many differences between this chip and the Athlon FX-51. Both are clocked at the same frequency and both have 1MB of L2 Cache. What makes them different? The following graph should explain it all.

Athlon64 FX-51

Athlon64 3400+

Socket

940

754
Frequency

2.2GHz

2.2GHz

Manufacturing
Technology

0.13 micron SOI

0.13 micron SOI

Integrated Memory
Controller

Dual Channel - 128bit

Single Channel - 64bit
Supported Memory

DDR400, DDR333, DDR266
(all registered)

DDR400, DDR333, DDR 266
L2 Cache

1024KB

1024KB
Cool’n’Quiet

No

Yes

The chart above lists the main features of each chip and the differences between the two include the integrated memory controller, and the Cool’n’Quiet feature on the 3400+. You can easily see that the 3400+ was meant for non power users as it does not require nor does it support more expensive registered memory.