A New Kind Of Fast: AMD Athlon XP 2200+

Comparison: T-Bred Vs. Palomino Vs. T-Bird Vs. (Barton)

With the launch of the Thoroughbred core, AMD Athlon has reached the third step in its evolution. The first core, the Thunderbird, was already introduced around two years ago. The manufacturer made a further step with the launch of the Palomino core in October 2001, where the new features essentially consisted of an SSE command set extension and optimized cache lines.

Now, in June 2002, there's the Thoroughbred, which brings us a modified layout of the internal CPU units, as well as a smaller structure (0.13 µm). Detailed information is given in our table. The animated GIF above shows you the difference in size in the CPU die. To make this as complete as possible, we have also included data for the Barton core, which is expected to come out in Q3, marking the fourth and last phase of development for the Athlon program based on Socket 462.