As expected earlier this year, AMD has started to transit all its K7 CPU models on the latest “Barton” and “Thorton” core design. We see a proof in this report that claims AMD Athlon XP 2400+ on “Thorton” core are available in Japanese retail.

In an attempt to cut the manufacturing costs down, AMD decided to transit the whole top-to-bottom family of Athlon XP chips onto the “Barton” or “Thorton” designs, follow-ups for the Thoroughbred core launched in mid-2002. The “Barton” has 512KB of L2, while the “Thorton” switches off half of the L2 cache and provides only 256KB of the second level cache memory. As a result, the former core is found in all processors starting from 2500+, while the latter is utilized in models 2400+ and below.

Availability of 2.0GHz Athlon XP “Thorton” 2400+ processor with 266MHz EV-6 FSB may mean that AMD has sold out its Thoroughbred chips and now all the K7 processors are manufactured using more advanced designs. Earlier this year we reported about AMD Athlon 2000+ with the mentioned core availability in Russia, now we see that in Asia AMD already sells 2400+ chips.

Due to quite high yield of AMD K7 processors, a lot of “Thorton” chips with disabled 256KB of L2 can be tuned into the fully-functional “Barton” processors after some easy manipulations we described in our news-story titled “How to Enable Additional 256KB of L2 Cache on AMD Athlon XP Processors Model 10.”