K7 was the Athlon XP series of processors. They sold well, and were usually cheaper than Pentium 4’s even though they performed the same. Later on, when the Pentium 4 reached 800MHz FSB, the Athlon XP couldn’t compete anymore, and that’s when K8 was announced.

The K7 series of processors worked the same as any other processor; it communicated with memory through the Northbridge on the chipset, and communicated with other devices through the Southbridge.

K7 reached 2.2GHz, which translates to a performance rating of 3200+.

When the K7 couldn’t compete with the Pentium 4 anymore, AMD needed a new plan. This plan was K8.

K8 was revolutionary. Instead of connecting with the memory though the Northbridge on the motherboard, the Northbridge was built directly into the processor. The real term for this is an on die memory controller. The advantage to this is latency. With the traditional design the processor has to contact the Northbridge, then the Northbridge contacts the memory. With the K8 design the processor can speak directly to memory, which results in lower latency, and ultimately more speed.

Then there is the next leap, Hypertransport. Many people think Hypertransport is AMD’s Hyperthreading, this is wrong. Hyperthreading is to do with software having two threads and the processor executing both at the same time, AMD don’t have this technology. Hypertransport is a connection between the processor and other components, and a fast one at that. It is NOT a connection between processor and memory like many people think, it only connects to other devices. There are different Hypertransport speeds available, but in practice there is very little difference in performance.

Another feature of the K8 is something called NX technology. This can stop some viruses, with the support of the OS (Windows XP needs SP2 to make this work). If you want the full description of the NX technology, Anandtech have an article about it here.

Last but not least is 64 bit technology, which I explained already.

Now, to go any further you need to know what processors AMD have available. There are three different processors as mentioned earlier. On the next page is the rundown.