Athlon 4 Multiplier

Hi,

Anyone got any speculation on the multipliers for the Athlon 4? I was just reading the THG Athlon 4 article and saw they were now able to support 18x multiplier.

Even if they don't realise 100% utilisation of those bridges, they must expect multipliers significantly over what we have today.

The Mobile Athlon 4 is only 100/200FSB, so much higher multipliers make sense, but since I assume the desktop chip will use exactly the same package, can we say that AMD feel there will be some very fast chips coming out during the life of the processor?

Theoretically the potential is there to configure to run 2.4Ghz (although I'm NOT saying the core would support this, maybe 2Ghz though, 15x133?), and then sometime later next year will be the next chip releases. Since the Athon 4 is basically a tuned Athlon core, AMD obviously see a fair bit of life left in it yet...?

Does anyone know what the Northwood CPU speeds will be released at? I think I read around that it might be 2Ghz? If the Athlon 4 scales core speeds up near P4 speeds (nothing guarenteed I know) it _may_ serve to offset poential SSE2 software enhancements and match the processors more evenly. It might not of course, we await Northwood and desktop Athlon 4 to really tell. Either way it looks like it will be a great 12 months+ for people that want really fast competitive systems.

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