The New Athlon Processor: AMD Is Finally Overtaking Intel

Future Athlon Models

Although AMD keeps everything pretty secret still, we could still get some information.

According to the above two slides there'll be indeed a low-cost version of K7, probably with smaller and slower L2-cache than the normal Athlon, then there'll be 'Athlon Professional' and 'Athlon Ultra', the Professional could possibly come with a faster L2-cache, the 'Ultra' might have larger as well as faster L2-cache. Athlon's server-version is supposed to come with a serial number, known from Pentium III. The normal Athlons won't have that number though, because AMD can do without the trouble that Intel had with the PIII serial number just fine.

As long as AMD hasn't disclosed more, I'm left to do wild speculations, and that's something I'm really not good at. I prefer leaving this to others.