AMD readies Thoroughbred to Palomino change

AS WE NOTED a week or two back, motherboard manufacturers have now received samples of Thoroughbreds and are making the necessary changes to accommodate the new Athlon parts.

Although it's still unclear when in Q2 AMD will introduce these parts, we'd expect the first of the breed, the 2200+, to come earlier rather than later.

When we published AMD's January roadmap, the 2100+ Palomino was just a twinkling in the firm's eye, and therefore on the graphical roadmap we saw a move from a 2000+ core to a Thoroughbred core.

But now we expect that 2000+ to be a 2100+, for obvious reasons - although whether AMD will also introduce a 2000+ Thoroughbred is still unclear.

The roadmaps then also showed that in Q3 we'd see 2600+, 2400+, 2200+ and 2000+ Thoroughbreds.

AMD was demonstrating a 2800+ Thoroughbred at CeBIT, so it may well be that its product plans for these clock speeds have also changed recently.

As the company changes from the old core to the new, it will displace the Palominos with the Thoroughbreds relatively quickly.

This is not so easy with the Intel roadmap - a bewildering range of clock speeds, bus speeds and the like will make life rather confusing for both system integrators and customers.

The Pentium 4, at 2.4GHz, is Intel's next speed step and we believe that's arriving in early April. Again, this differs somewhat from the last set of roadmaps Intel has given to its customers.

Both AMD and Intel do warn their customers that roadmaps can change swiftly and, of course, they're eyeing each other's product introductions up to sell more chips for maximum effect.

Here's the 20th January AMD roadmap in graphics, while there's more detailed information on the company's Q2 and Q3 plans here. µ