AMD Thunderbird Launch

June 5, 2000 4:10 AM

AMD today officially launched the "new" Athlon (formerly codenamed Thunderbird), and has also started shipping of their Celeron-competing Duron processor. Currently the enhanced Athon will be available at 1GHz, 950, 900, 850, 800 and 750MHz. AnandTech already has a review (for the 1Ghz and 800mhz version), and the results aren't exactly what you would call impressive. It's a nice increase over the old Athlon, but the Pentium3 at the same frequency with a i820 chipset and RDRAM is still mighty close in some benchmarks, or beats it in others. There's also a 1Ghz review on Hardware Central. And that's not all, as there's also an AMD interview on FullOn3D. Here's a Q3 benchmark from Anand / Sharky:

demo0001 640x480x16
145.6 / 115.7 - Intel P3 1Ghz (i820 + RDRAM)
143.9 / 132.3 - Thunderbird 1Ghz
133.8 / 112.7 - Old Athlon 1Ghz
132.2 - Intel P3 1Ghz

update Steve: I added the Sharky benchmarks which show the T-bird on top to give a little parity. Also AMD has announced it is now also shipping from it's German plant in Dresden. The Dresden fab is producing the new Athlon ( featuring 256 kb of on-chip L2 cache and 128 kb of L1 cache ) , with clock speeds up to 1Ghz. Unlike the ones made in Austin,TX (aluminum technology) the Dresden fab produces processors using copper interconnect technology. As I mentioned yesterday, there are some photos of the Thunderbird on Tweak Town. Here is a list of more reviews: (Thanks Blues) Sharky Extreme, Tom's Hardware Guide, CPU Review, PC World, Gamers Depot, and Ace's Hardware.