AMD Athlon 4 - The Palomino is Here

An updated roadmap

AMD has yet again updated their processor roadmap and they will continue to do so as we get closer and closer to 2002.

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As we've mentioned before, the workstation Athlon 4 (Palomino core) will be released next month. The workstation version of the Athlon 4 will debut at a much lower clock than 1.5GHz but still higher than the 1GHz clock of the mobile Athlon 4. This will allow AMD to follow in Intel's footsteps of working out all the kinks in manufacturing the Athlon 4 with the mobile and workstation parts that ship in relatively low volumes compared to the desktop parts. This should prove to make the eventual desktop launch a very smooth one.

AMD does have quite a bit of time to get everything worked out with the Athlon 4 core and increase yields since the desktop version of the Athlon 4 won't hit the streets until the third quarter of this year. This launch will most likely in August, and it will make its introduction at 1.5GHz according to our CPUs in 2001 Roadmap Update. This makes the upcoming 1.4GHz Athlon the last Thunderbird based solution we'll see from AMD.

Since there won't be any workstation version of the Morgan based Duron, we won't see a desktop Duron with the Athlon 4 enhancements until after the desktop Athlon 4 launch. This puts the Duron (Morgan) desktop launch at late August or September of this year. Remembering that the intended market segment for the Duron is the value segment where integrated video is a must, the Morgan core may not provide as great of a performance increase as the Palomino offers for the Athlon 4. The reason being that data prefetch is dependent on having a high bandwidth FSB and memory bus, yet most Duron platforms won't have the same PC2100 DDR SDRAM that their Athlon counterparts will.

ALi, SiS and VIA are working to change that as their roadmaps do show value DDR platforms becoming available in the second half of this year. If they abide by their roadmaps then the Morgan core should truly take the value market segment to some very high performance levels. And it will need to because the next incarnation of the Celeron is rumored to be much like a Pentium III; the Duron won't have as easy of a time competing as it once did.

In the first half of 2002 AMD is going to be releasing the successor to the Palomino core with their Thoroughbred. The Thoroughbred will be a 0.13-micron solution, making it even cheaper to produce and will be available in both desktop and mobile versions. If AMD's internal plans are anything like those of Intel's then the Thoroughbred may end up with a 512KB L2 cache, but we have yet to receive confirmation on that. The reason we have to hypothesize this is because a 0.13-micron Athlon 4 will take up 52% of the die of the current 0.18-micron parts. With all of that saved space AMD is bound to use some of it to improve performance.

The Thoroughbred will also see a mobile launch with PowerNow! support around the same time but what is truly interesting is that there will be no Thoroughbred part for the workstation/server markets. Unless AMD specifically disables SMP on the Thoroughbred CPUs (which they haven't done thus far, the Thunderbird does work in SMP mode although not officially sanctioned by AMD), it would make much more sense to run a pair of Thoroughbred cores on 760MP than it would to run a pair of Palomino based Athlon 4s. If AMD is serious enough about keeping users from doing this, they could very well disable SMP on the Thoroughbred CPUs. We have no reason to believe AMD would do this, but then again they've never been in a position like this before. It'll be interesting to keep an eye on.

Later in the first half of 2002 AMD will be releasing the Duron version of the Thoroughbred core known as Appaloosa. The only difference between Appaloosa and Thoroughbred will be cache and maybe FSB frequency. Appaloosa will also be made into a mobile part around the same time.