Thoroughbred, Palomino benchmarks up

Meanwhile, as our correspondent below has done a hard job rounding up all the stuff about AMD, Athlon and Thoroughbred, we think we should let him complete this story.

Mr. Mike I am a regular visitor of your site and I found your site quite informative, your specially is the IT stories you uncover that we otherwise never know. The purpose of writing this mail to you is that I am getting some hints that AMD next AthloneXP (Tnred) is not just a simple die shrink of palomino core but there are some other architectural enhacement in Tbred. May be 12 pipeline stages as appose to 10 or inclusion of SSE-2, some new form of 3DNow! or x86-64 instructions sets in Tbred. I am sending you this info because you have moles inside big IT firms which can bring out the truth about these roumers surrounding Tbred. Please if you intent to publish my mail do not give my email address.

Thanks

Here are the hint stories with their respective links.

1. From SiliconInvestor (AMD Shareholders Meeting)
"On the topic of Tbred, he heavily hinted that Tbred has some enhancements, which he did not want to get into, which will enable it to work faster than Palomino. So it is not just a shrink. He said that the desktop version has been qualified, and it is now up to marketing people when the public release will happen."

here.

2- From AMDZone (AMD Q1 2002 Earnings Call Notes, Q and A Session)
Page-2
"Q. 2.2ghz 2nd half for athlon?
A. absolutely 2.2ghz by 2nd half of year, making modifications as we speak, we will get to that level, we will do something with the architecture to improve performance, intel is now putting A on their cpus names, lets stop talking about ghz, we believe we will continue to improve architecture while we improve clock speeds, the customers like the improvements in performance and having two customers."

Here.

3- From JC-News (AMD 2002 First Quarter Conferece call Transcript)
"Q. Top for Athlon
A. Lots of headroom ... 2.2 GHz no problem. Intel is using model numbers now
Here.

4- From AcesHardware (AMD Prelim #s -- More Q&A)
Athlon should hit 2.2GHz by beginning?? H2
Here

5- From Lycos Finance (AMD's new secrete weapon .13u TBred)

What is new in Tbred.
1) same Cache L1/L2 = 128/256K.
2) lower core valtage, lower power consumsion.
3) smaller die in .13u.
4) Added SSE2 and plus ...(they don't know what, they know has something else).
Here

6- From Penstarsys (64 Bit Top to Bottom)
Page-1
"AMD recently changed its public roadmap and shows Barton as the desktop and mobile Athlon with 512 KB of L2 cache, as well as no longer being a SOI part. Adding 512 KB of cache is not like slapping legos together, so this project has been in motion for quite some time, and only now has AMD shown that this particular project was in the works. AMD further said that other architectural advancements will allow Barton to scale farther in clockspeed than the T-bred, even though both are made on the same process." Here µ