Please, don’t get in despair! J The title doesn’t at all imply the cancellation of the 0.13micron Barton core, which has changed its essence in AMD’s latest roadmap and turned into a Thoroughbred with 512KB L2 cache (see this and this news stories).

The whole story is about a totally different thing: the rumors from Taiwan say that the new Athlon XP processors on 0.13micron Barton core will be produced by UMC, while AMD will focus on Opteron processors (SledgeHammer and ClawHammer DP) and uni-processor ClawHammer version. Here is what the situation will look like in general:

• Fab25 (Austin, Texas, USA). At present they produce 0.18micron Duron (Morgan) CPUs and flash memory and by the end of the year they are going to shift to flash production only.
• Fab30 (Dresden, Germany). Now they manufacture 0.18micron Athlon XP (Palomino) and trial supplies of the new 0.13micron Athlon XP (Thoroughbred) processors. By the end of the year they will be producing only Thoroughbred (and start making SledgeHammer/ClawHammer CPUs in limited quantities). By mid 2003 the fab will be focusing only on 64bit processors.
• UMC (Taiwan). In Q4 2002 they should start production of 0.13micron Athlon (XP?) on Barton core. Later they will use 0.09micron technology together with AMD. I don’t know exactly yet what CPUs will be built on the 0.09micron core. Supposedly, it will be a 0.09micron Barton version and uni-processor ClawHammer.