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AMD Athlon Thunderbird
The Athlon was, upon its release, a radically new design from AMD, there were a few issues that kept it from blowing the doors off Intel's fastest Coppermine CPUs. Most notable was the Athlon's cache design: a low-speed L2 cache, as opposed to a full-speed on-die cache on the Intel Coppermine series of Pentium III chips. This problem was most visible on Athlon 750 and 800 and 850MHz models, where the L2 cache was set at a paltry 2/5 of the core frequency.
The Athlon was, upon its release, a radically new design from AMD, there were a few issues that kept it from blowing the doors off Intel's fastest Coppermine CPUs. Most notable was the Athlon's cache design: a low-speed L2 cache, as opposed to a full-speed on-die cache on the Intel Coppermine series of Pentium III chips. This problem was most visible on Athlon 750 and 800 and 850MHz models, where the L2 cache was set at a paltry 2/5 of the core frequency. The new Thunderbird design from AMD, officially launched June 6th, 2000 at the Computex 2000 tradeshow in Taipei, addresses these issues. It's a chip comprising an astonishing 37 million transistors and full-speed, on-die L2 cache that, in most regards, outpaces a comparably clocked Coppermine.
Perhaps most importantly, the Thunderbird (really, just AMD's internal code name for its revised Athlon design), is priced approximately US$100 less than Intel's comparably clocked chips, yet provides about 10 percent better performance overall.
There are still a few issues with the new chip. Notably, it is both multiplier and clock-locked meaning that, without special hardware (e.g., the forthcoming Kinetiz 7T motherboard from QDI) or modifications, it can't be overclocked at all. (Of course, sites such as Tom's Hardware promptly provided the dirty details, although reports at BXBoards and other sites suggest that AMD in Aug. 2000 began removing multiplier change function pin entirely from its Tbird chips.) So far, the Thunderbird has been seen only in a new Socket A form factor that limits the number of motherboards it is compatible with - and early reports suggest that so-called "Slotket" adapters don't provide a viable compatibility solution for older Slot A Athlon motherboards.
Although, as noted above, the on-die cache is now running at the full speed of the CPU, the amount of cache memory has been halved from 512K (as found on the original Athlon) down to 256K. This, in addition to the 128K of L1 cache, yields a total of 384K of internal system cache memory -- less than even the earliest Pentium II models. Even so, the Thunderbird is an excellent CPU choice for those seeking a high-performance PC
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