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There have been many great rivalries between two protagonists, such as the great rivalries of Tottenham Hotspur verses Arsenal and Ford Mondeo verses Vauxhall Vectra which spring to mind. Within the x86 processor industry the rivalry of Intel verses AMD has been one which has existed for many years, with it intensifying progressively since the 486 era. The past year has seen AMD's most concerted effort to wrestle PC market share away from Intel in the form of it's impressive Athlon processor. The original K7 and K75 Athlon processors have been a great success for AMD in winning large portions of retail market share away from Intel in the mid to high-end PC market. The Athlon has also allowed AMD to capitalise on Intel's recent production/supply problems found with the "Coppermine" Pentium III processor. The problem for AMD in recent months has surrounded the Athlon's lack of a full speed Level 2 cache as opposed to the full speed Level 2 cache found on it's main rival Intel's "Coppermine" Pentium III. As the Athlon's clock speed rose above 700 MHz, fitting it with Level 2 cache SRAM chips which could keep up the 1/2 speed divider became increasingly difficult and expensive for AMD. As a work around, AMD dropped the Level 2 cache SRAM divider on the 750, 800 and 850 MHz Athlon's to 2.5, the 900 and 950 to 2.25x and the 1 GHz to 3. This hurt the performance of the Athlon as the Level 2 cache speed wasn't rising with the processor's clock speed, especially as the cache of the "Coppermine" Pentium III ran at the same speed as the processor core. The remedy for this situation is where the Athlon "Thunderbird" comes in... AMD Athlon "Thunderbird", What's new?The latest version of AMD's Athlon processor, codenamed "Thunderbird" features a number of enhancements and changes over the older K7 and K75 Athlon processors. The first major change for the Athlon "Thunderbird" is the inclusion of 256 Kb of Level 2 cache RAM on the processor die, as opposed to 512 Kb of 1/2 (or 1/25 or 1/3) speed cache SRAM mounted on the processor cartridge. Like the K75 Athlon before it, the "Thunderbird" is manufactured using the 0.18 micron manufacturing process at AMD's Austin Texas or Dreden chip fabrication plants. The chips manufactured at Dresden will utilse the Copper-interconnect process licenced from Motorola. Luckily for users, the advantages from the Copper-interconnect process are not yet noticable so there will be no performance difference between Athlon "Thunderbirds" which were made on either the Aluminium or Copper interconnect process. There were no new clock speeds introduced at the launch of the Athlon "Thunderbird". The new Socket A Athlon will run at speeds of 750 MHz, 800 MHz, 850 Mhz, 900 MHz, 950 MHz and 1 GHz. These chips will be priced the same as the outgoing Slot A, K75 based Athlons. The new Athlon will not carry the "Thunderbird" name. This is AMD's code-name for distinguishing the new Athlon from the K7 and K75 Athlons. The other big change between earlier Athlon processors (K7 & K75) and the "Thunderbird" will be the packaging format. Whilst Athlon processors to date have been manufactured in the Slot A package, the Athlon "Thunderbird" uses the 423 pin Socket A form factor. This form factor marks AMD's reversion to the older-style ZIF socket motherboard connector seen with Socket 7 and Socket 370 processors. The reason for AMD's reversion to Socketed processors is the same as Intel's. This is that the inclusion of 256 Kb Level 2 cache onto the 0.18 micron processor core allows the chip to be packaged in a much smaller space. Socketed processors are significantly cheaper to manufacture compared to their Slot counterparts, thus it was inevitable that AMD would return to that form-factor once the opportunity arose.
To see the effect these changes have, read on...
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