AMD's 2000 Roadmap - The Facts

It won't be long before AMD regains the performance lead in both the low end and the high end desktop markets.  Although the current Athlon is definitely performing quite well, its power is being severely limited by its slow L2 cache. 

The release of the Thunderbird & Duron will help restore power to the AMD name, but the real thing to wait for will be the Mustang, which in the Athlon form will be the competitor to Intel's Willamette. 

The lack of any motherboard solutions with DDR SDRAM support at the release of the Thunderbird will definitely be a downside, but so will the relative lack of any Slot-A Thunderbird parts.  The reality here is that if you want to stay on top of the AMD x86 processor market, you'll probably have to upgrade twice, once to the Thunderbird and once again to the Mustang unless you can find it in you to wait for the latter. 

The introduction of the Mustang should restore some balance to AMD's product structure, with clearly defined high end, mainstream and low end processor solutions falling under the Athlon Ultra, Athlon and Duron product families.

For the present day consumer, if you're buying an Athlon motherboard today with hopes of using it with tomorrow's Athlon processors, think again.  It's an unfortunate reality, but it's better to know now than find out in two months when you're kicking yourself for picking up that new KX133 board just a few weeks earlier.

The CPU market is going to be a very interesting place come this fall, although AMD will get a bit of a head start this summer with the release of their Athlon (Thunderbird) and Duron parts.