AMD PLATFORMS CERTIFIED FOR PINNACLE SYSTEMS' STATE-OF-THE-ART VIDEO EDITING SOLUTIONS.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) recently announced that Pinnacle Systems Inc., winner of seven Emmy Awards in the field of digital video production, has certified AMD Athlon and AMD Athlon MP processor-based platforms for Pinnacle's top-of-the-line digital video PCI hardware editing cards.

The AMD Athlon processor has been certified for the Pinnacle DV500 PLUS real-time DV editing solution and the Pinnacle Pro-ONE professional video editing/authoring system. The AMD Athlon MP processor featuring Smart MP technology has been certified on multiprocessor systems for TARGA 3000, Pinnacle's content creation and streaming platform. In addition, Pinnacle Systems declared that AMD Athlon and AMD Athlon MP processor-based platforms meet its high standards for certification on its state-of-the-art Non-Linear Editing (NLE) video solutions.

"Real-time video editing is a very computation intensive task that stresses all aspects of a computer system," explained Bill Loesch, vice president of Product Management and Engineering of Pinnacle Systems' Personal Web Video Division. "The AMD Athlon and AMD Athlon MP processors provide the extra performance and stable working environment that will scale to meet our customers' needs."

"We are extremely happy to be part of the certification program at Pinnacle Systems and look forward to working with the renowned digital video company to enable the certification of future solutions," said Richard Heye, vice president of Platform Engineering and Infrastructure for AMD's Computation Products Group. "AMD Athlon and AMD Athlon MP processors deliver outstanding performance. Video professionals know that system performance, and not simply processor frequency, is all important for the best experience on real-time video production work."

Based on the state-of-the-art AMD Athlon MP processor and the AMD-760 MP chipset, AMD's multiprocessing platform supports Double Data Rate (DDR) memory technology and incorporates AMD's latest innovation, Smart MP technology. AMD's Smart MP technology enables the combined power of the processor and chipset to deliver better overall performance on widely available, x86-based, dual-processor platforms.

The AMD Athlon processor is an x86-compatible, seventh-generation design featuring a superpipelined, nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized for high clock frequency; the industry's first fully pipelined, superscalar floating point unit for x86 platforms; high-performance cache architecture, now featuring 384KB of total on-chip cache (256KB of on-chip level two (L2) cache and 128KB of on-chip level one (L1) cache); enhanced 3DNow! technology with 24 additional instructions designed to improve integer math calculations, data movement for Internet streaming, and DSP communications. The AMD Athlon processor features either a 266MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) or a 200MHz FSB based on the Alpha EV6 bus protocol. AMD Athlon processors are manufactured using AMD's 0.18-micron process technology in Fab 25 in Austin, Texas and AMD's 0.18 micron technology in Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany.

The AMD Athlon MP processor is a seventh-generation x86 processor designed for high- performance multiprocessing servers and workstations. It provides up to a 38 percent increase over widely available x86 multiprocessor-based systems on benchmarks such as WebBench, ServerBench and 3D Studio Max.

A key advantage of AMD's multiprocessing platform is Smart MP technology, which greatly enhances overall platform performance by increasing data movement between the two CPUs, chipset and memory system. Smart MP technology features dual point-to-point, high-speed 266MHz system buses with Error Correcting Code (ECC) support designed to provide up to 2.1GB per second per CPU of bus bandwidth in a dual-processor system. Smart MP technology also has an optimized Modified Owner Exclusive Shared Invalid (MOESI) cache coherency protocol that manages data and memory traffic in a multiprocessing environment.

The AMD Athlon MP processor, with stable Socket A infrastructure and support for DDR memory technology, has a high performance full-speed cache with hardware data pre-fetch, a fully pipelined superscalar floating point engine, and an exclusive L2 Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). It also incorporates 3DNow! Professional technology, which has 52 new instructions that extend AMD's 3DNow! technology, enabling smoother, richer and more lifelike images, more precise digital audio and an enriched Internet experience.