News

AMD's Thunderbird Processor Roars at 1 GHz

• By Scott Bekker
• June 05, 2000

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) today introduced the new AMD Athlon processor featuring on-chip L2 cache memory. The company also announced that it is shipping the new Duron processor to manufacturers worldwide.

The new Athlon, which until now had been code-named Thunderbird, will be shipped to OEMs, including Compaq Computer Corp. (www.compaq.com), Fujitsu-Siemens Computers (www.fujitsu-siemenc.com), Gateway (www.gateway.com), Hewlett-Packard Co. (www.hp.com), and IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com).

The new Athlon processors are available at speeds of 1 GHz and 950, 900, 850, 800, and 750 MHz. They are available in both Slot A and Socket A architectures.

In response to AMD's (www.amd.com) release of the new Athlon processor, many of the company's infrastructure partners announced chipsets and motherboards optimized for AMD's Socket A infrastructure for the new Athlon and Duron processors.

"The enhanced AMD Athlon processor has proven to be startlingly fast," said John Alley, program manager at Microsoft Enterprise Computing Labs. "Traditional processor hungry enterprise applications that typically bog down systems are aided by the new AMD Athlon processor's performance-enhancing L2 cache memory. The AMD Athlon processor's support for PC133 memory, its 200-MHz system bus and solid architecture enables incredibly stable and very powerful computing platforms." - Isaac Slepner