We reported that AMD supplies its Taiwanese partners with the future AMD Athlon XP processors with 333MHz system bus some time ago and now HardOCP site has proved this by publishing the photo of this chip. The picture itself can be viewed here, below are some of my thoughts regarding it.

First of all, this processor is not a fake, but real. It is marked as AXDA2700DKV3D and if we take a look at the OPN table in the “AMD Athlon XP Processor Model 8 Data Sheet”, we may find out almost all technical details about the chip. The CPU on the picture is the Athlon XP 2700+ Model 8 processor for desktops, equipped with 256KB of L2 cache, packaged in OPGA package, its operating voltage is 1.65V and the core temperature may be up to 85C degrees. The last letter in the code always represents the FSB bus frequency on AMD processors, “B” stands for 100MHz and “C” stands for 133MHz. It is logically to assume that ascending letter means increasing FSB frequency, hence, “D” should stand for 166MHz.

All in all, some lucky guys managed to grab the upcoming Athlon XP 2700+ CPU from AMD. However, I believe there are very few such processors these days. The first business week of September has ended and we have not yet seen the Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+ chips, announced back in August, for sale anywhere. Keeping in mind that in a month time, on October the 7th, AMD will reveal considerably more powerful model 2700+ processor, there will be a very small time gap between the “old” and the new one.