AMD representatives at the CeBIT show say, that in spite of the fact that AMD promised to announce first Thoroughbred processors this month, they will appear in shops a little later.

It should be noted, that as we expected before, AMD will announce just mobile Thoroughbred based Athlon 4 in the end of March. Desktop Athlon XP with the new 0.13-micron core will appear only in the end of spring/beginning of summer. Before that another processor with 2200+ rating from Athlon XP line is expected. It will be based on the old 0.18-micron Palomino core.

AMD representatives confirmed that Thoroughbred will not be different from Palomino in architecture, will work at 266 MHz bus frequency and will have a 256-Kb L2-cache. That is why new 0.13-micron Athlon XP will be fully compatible with the old mainboards. Nonetheless, AMD is planning to switch its CPUs to a faster 333 MHz FSB, however, it can happen most probably, only after the next Barton core release.

According to AMD reports, first Athlon XP (Thoroughbred) will have a 2400+ rating. Besides, two slower Thoroughbred models with 2200+ and 2000+ ratings will be released.