We have already mentioned in our news that AMD is going to introduce its first Athlon XP processor built on the new 0.13micron Thoroughbred core in the end of Q1’02. We would like to remind you, that the newcomer is supposed to work at 1.67GHz and to be marked as 2000+, which is the same frequency and rating as those of the last Athlon XP based on the Palomino core, which should be announced in early January 2002. This coincidence has already pushed us towards the idea that 0.18micron Palomino and 0.13micron Thoroughbred cores do not have any architectural differences. In other words, Palomino and Thoroughbred working at the give core clock will show identical performance.
Today our suppositions got an official confirmation. AMD representative, Damon Muzny said in an interview to CPUTimes site the following things:

The transition to .13 is a die shrink only. There are no architecture changes associated with that. So processors will function the same... just smaller, faster and cooler as they scale up. Also, shrinking the die to .13 means getting more dies per wafer, improving production and lowering manufacturing costs... which only makes us more competitive.

This way, AMD hasn’t prepared any surprise for Intel in response to the doubling of the L2 cache in its pentium4 (Northwood) processors. The company hasn’t yet prepared anything. However, we shouldn’t forget that in H2’02 AMD will introduce a new Barton core manufactured with SOI technology, which is very likely to have some architectural enhancements.