This Year's Targets

As soon as both megafabs are working at 100% capacity, AMD will be able to supply 30% of the global demand for microprocessors. That's exactly what AMD is planning to do as soon as possible. The new Fab 30 is meant to have 1400 people working there at the end of 2000. There will even be 1800 people employed one year later. Thanks to those copper interconnects, AMD should be able to rise clock speeds for future processors at least as fast as Intel. This year is going to stay hot, because Intel's Willamette processor is supposed to become available in the fall at initial clock speeds of 1.4 GHz.

Conclusion

Having such a production facility at their disposal, AMD is in a better position than ever before. The yield is quite impressive so far, and thanks to one of the most advanced material analysis labs, AMD is able to eliminate errors during the chip production really quickly.

As you can read in the new Athlon review , the new Thunderbird core is able to bring the AMD CPU back to the very top.

The presentation of the new Athlon processor included some benchmark graphics, which partially did not start at 0. AMD obviously wanted to emphasize some benchmark results to make the Athlon look better in their comparisons against the Pentium III. As AMD certainly does not in need to make use of such cheap marketing tricks, I don't know why they still did it. After all, the new Athlon is a very competitive processor which does not neet to hide from any other CPU available.

I was a bit disappointed as the Duron was left out almost completely. Everything would be fine if AMD wasn't already shipping this new CPU as well. In consideration of its origin, the Duron will likely be able to blow away the Celeron, which is of course its main enemy. Stay tuned for our first Duron review! This summer is going to be quite hot indeed, don't you think?