Athlon Thunderbirds Made In Germany: AMD's Fab 30 in Dresden

It is done, Thunderbird is here now. Its presentation was almost at the same time both at the Computex in Taipei and in AMD's new production facility in Dresden. The full review of the new Athlon has already been posted on Monday. Today, we will introduce their new complex and also give you some background information.

Everybody knew that both new AMD processors, Athlon and Duron, are based on the same Athlon type core. That's why most of us assumed that both CPUs should be released on June 5. In spite of the fact that they are already shipping Duron CPUs in quantities, AMD did not officially announce this processor.

In my opinion, the Duron is no less interesting than the new Athlon processor, as the only difference is the smaller cache size of 64 instead of 256 kBytes. Although the L2 cache size may be very small, we expect the Duron to be almost as fast as the old Athlon processor. Even more important will be the price/performance ratio, as the Duron 600 will initially only cost $112. That is the best proof that the old Athlon will disappear quite soon. AMD wants the transition from Slot A to Socket A to pass off as fast as possible, which underlines our forecast.