After it was reported that AMD will unveil its Athlon XP processors that support 333MHz system bus and that the 2700+ processors are going to be the last CPUs based on Thoroughbred core, a lot of rumours started to appear all around the web in regards the future processors from AMD. In order to make the situation a bit clearer for our readers, we decided to present several official facts and analyse what we are told by the mass-media.

It is a well-known fact that on October the 7th AMD unveils its processors with 333MHz FSB support. According to the official document created on the 1st of August, the Athlon XP 2700+ processor with 333MHz bus and 256KB of L2 cache is the last CPU to utilise the Thoroughbred core. Models 2800+ and 3000+ will be based on the Barton CPU core. The latter supports 333MHz system bus and has 512KB of L2 cache. I want to stress that AMD declares the timeframes for Barton’s launch as the first quarter 2003, but the company does not indicate the clock-speed of the newcomer.

As you may see, according to the official plans, AMD will only introduce CPUs with the model number of 2700+ this year, while Intel will reveal its 3.06GHz Pentium 4 in November. It is logical to assume that AMD now have to push the speeds (or ratings) of their processors up in order to maintain parity with Intel in terms of performance. At the moment AMD has only two ways for its K7 family to increase the speed: to help UMC launching the Barton core in the shortest time possible, to speed up the Thoroughbreds. Both “ways” have been confirmed by certain media sources.

On this Taiwanese site it is claimed that AMD will bump the speed of current Athlon XP up to the model 2900+ and also introduce several lower-clocked CPUs with 333MHz bus. The product line will be as follows:

AthlonXP 2000+/1666MHz
AthlonXP 2100+/1733MHz
AthlonXP 2200+/1800MHz
AthlonXP 2300+/1833MHz (333MHz FSB)
AthlonXP 2400+/2000MHz
AthlonXP 2500+/2000MHz (333MHz FSB)
AthlonXP 2600+/2133MHz
AthlonXP 2700+/2166MHz (333MHz FSB)
AthlonXP 2800+/2266MHz
AthlonXP 2900+/2333MHz (333MHz FSB)

On the other hand, this site reports that Barton is set to be launched in October.

There is nothing hard in switching the processors to work at higher FSB speed, moreover, as Pentium 4 CPUs are now extremely cheap, the Sunnyvale based processor manufacturer have to strengthen the specs of their products in order to be able to compete. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of doubts regarding higher FSB speed on lower clocked processors. As for the rolling our the Barton in October, it can be considered as unlikely. Provided that both companies want the yields to be high enough at the launch, they will not force the product to be ready at least two month before the schedule.

As always, only time will reveal the truth.