It’s not really my intention to go into CPU theory here, as truthfully that is a bit boring to me the gamer. However, some basic words about the Athlon 64 should be said in a review on a CPU. So I will summarize the important features of the CPU. If you want the full technical details you can click AMD’s Technical whitepaper on the CPU from which this information is derived.

The 3400+ is AMD’s latest, fastest Athlon 64 CPU. Based upon the Claw Hammer CPU family, the 3400+ is clocked at 2.2 GHz speed and has 128KB of L1 cache and 1MB of L2 cache. A word should be said about the clock speed. AMD believes in Apple’s motto that Megahertz doesn’t matter, performance does (paraphrasing a bit here). As we’ll see in the performance section, this CPU is faster than the competition, even though the competition has a 1 GHz speed advantage.

Currently AMD’s 64-bit CPUs number 5. The Socket 940 Opteron which has a clock speed of 2.2 GHz, 128KB L1 cache and 1MB L2 cache targeted for the workstation market, the Athlon 64 FX51 which has a 2.2 GHz clock speed, 128KB L1 cache and 1MB L2 cache, the Athlon 64 3000 which has a 2.0 GHz clock speed, 128KB L1 cache and 512KB L2 cache. The Athlon 64 3200+, which has a 2.0 GHz clock speed, 128KB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache, and now the Athlon 64 3400, which has a 2.2 GHz clock speed, 128KB L1 cache, and 1MB L2 cache.

The CPU has 128KB of Level 1 cache organized in 64 Kilobyte data cache organized as 2-way associative and 64 Kilobyte Instruction cache organized as 2-way associative. Two 64 bit simultaneous instructions (load, store or combination) are supported.

The Athlon 64 supports the following instruction sets: x86 standard instructions, AMD 64-bit instructions, MMX and 3DNow technology instructions and SSE and SSE2 instructions. The Hammer CPUs are first x86 CPUs architecture from AMD to support SSE2 instructions. One interesting thing noted in the whitepaper on the Athlon 64 processor is the support for 2 GB of unbuffered non-ECC memory. As you may have seen in the Motherboards.org Athlon 64 reviews to date, mention of a 2 GB limitation for DDR400 is made. This is a CPU limitation and not a chipset limitation.