Despite the fact that 0.13micron manufacturing technology is still far from being ideal, the company keeps transferring its processors to the new Thoroughbred core. In Japan, where everything appears earlier and sells at a bit higher price than in the rest of the world, our colleagues from VR-Zone have already noticed Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) manufactured with finer technology.

The CPU we are talking about was marked as AXDA2000 AIRGA 0225, which corresponds to Thoroughbred marking. The nominal Vcore made 1.6V, which can be highly positive for the cases when this CPU works at over-nominal frequencies.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any info about the price of this new solution, however, we dare suppose that it will not be very much different from the price of the regular Athlon XP 2000+, which costs in Japan $150-$165 depending on the CPU series. Bearing in mind the relatively good overclocking potential of Athlon XP 2000+ (Thoroughbred) and the supposed price of around $200 we believe that purchasing this CPU based on the new core is a very attractive buy. Note that the slowest Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) is expected to feature the most attractive price-to-performance ratio.