0.13µ Thoroughbred to Ship this Month (AMD)
By Brian Neal
Wednesday, March 13, 2002 4:03 AM EST
According to this press release, AMD intends to begin shipping its 0.13µ Athlon XP processors, codenamed Thoroughbred, to customers later this month. As reported in the past, the 0.13µ Thoroughbred processor core measures 80mm², significantly smaller than the current 0.18µ Palomino core at 129mm². As indicated in the quote below, AMD intends to have fully transitioned all Athlon production to its 0.13µ process by the end of this year, which is also when it expects to begin shipping processors based on the Hammer architecture.
"AMD's leadership in manufacturing technology and outstanding design capabilities helps ensure that this small die will give us even more advantage in the future," said Bill Siegle, senior vice president and chief scientist, Technology Operations, AMD. "Our outstanding Fab 30 team in Dresden is already approaching mature yields for the 80mm2 `Thoroughbred' die."
On .13 micron technology, the "Thoroughbred" core of the AMD Athlon XP processor is approximately 38 percent smaller than the current AMD Athlon XP processor on .18 process technology.
By the end of 2002, AMD expects that all of the AMD Athlon processor family will be produced on .13 micron technology. AMD also expects to begin shipping its next-generation processor codenamed "Hammer," which uses a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) version of the .13 micron technology, at the end of the year.
There have been several rumors surrounding Thoroughbred regarding various changes and improvements to be made to the Athlon core for its 0.13µ transition. One such rumored improvement has been an L2 cache size increase to 512 KB. However, we can confirm that there have been no such changes to the Thoroughbred core and the L2 cache size remains at 256 KB.
