We managed to find some new info on the launching dates of the upcoming desktop AMD processors: Athlon and Duron based on Palomino and Morgan cores. According to a roadmap posted here, AMD isn’t going to start mass manufacturing of these processors before Q3 2001. In Q2 these processors will be only sampling, i.e. will be available in very small quantities only for mainboard developers and large OEM companies. The starting frequencies for the new CPUs will make 1.4GHz for Palomino and 950MHz for Morgan. As for the official launching date, it is going to be somewhere in July. So, there should be a certain pause with AMD processors after the announcements of Athlon 1.33GHz (Thunderbird) and Duron 900MHz (Spitfire), which are expected to take place during CeBIT show.
This way, Pentium 4 1.7GHz, which is coming out in the nearest future, will compete with AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1.33GHz. And only by the time Pentium 4 2GHz appears, AMD will be able to introduce a competitor based on a new core. Well, while there are no chipsets for Pentium 4 supporting any memory other than RDRAM and while the cost of RDRAM memory modules remains quite high, AMD hardly has any causes for concern. However, they should be very careful and make sure they don’t miss the moment when they will have to destroy Pentium 4 positions. However, taking into account that AMD postpones the launching of its Palomino CPUs not for the first time already and that the company has definitely underestimated the demand for Athlon processors, the situation appears not that cloudless for AMD.
As for the launching of 0.13 micron Thoroughbred and Appaloosa, the timeframe remains unchanged in the meanwhile. These CPUs will be replacing Palomino and Morgan next January and next March respectively. The first samples of the new processors should become available in Q4 2001.