AMD's 0.13-micron Thoroughbred - Cool but Slipping at 2200+

Final Words

When you have an extremely successful launch like what AMD achieved with Palomino, it's very difficult to one-up yourself and in this case it doesn't seem that AMD has. The Thoroughbred core does run cooler and cost less than its predecessor but there's simply not enough headroom in the current process to really get excited about it. Obviously if you're buying an Athlon XP today then you'll definitely want to make sure you get a Thoroughbred, but current Palomino owners should have no burning desire (no pun intended) to upgrade just yet.

The lack of overclocking headroom in these 0.13-micron parts make us question exactly how well AMD's 0.13-micron process is doing at this point. If yields are currently low and set to improve over time then AMD's 0.13-micron process is at fault currently, however if the process is sound and 1.8GHz is the max we're getting out of these cores then that points to architectural limitations that are holding the Athlon XP back. We will be keeping a very close eye on how AMD is able to scale their 0.13-micron processors over the coming months, if they are unable to hit above 1.8GHz today it may be a struggle between now and the end of the year to remain competitive with the Pentium 4.

On the other hand it seems as if AMD's sole purpose right now is to ensure that Hammer gets off on the right foot. A couple design wins in the server market next year for Opteron could spell more success for AMD than any Athlon has been able to do on the desktop side. In talking to VIA at Computex last week we came across a very important point about AMD's strategy with K8 vs. K7; if AMD can succeed with the K8 in the enterprise market then it opens new doors in the corporate market that were never penetrated by the current Athlon.

This may mean that the Athlon XP family is put on hold for a while as Intel gains a strong foothold in the desktop segment for the sake of making sure that Hammer is all that it could possibly be by the end of the year. We may see a few more 66MHz bumps between now and then but don't expect to get too excited about them unless AMD does decide to go ahead with Barton...