Future Athlon's

The Apollo KX133 Chipset

In order for the Athlon to keep up with Intel's "Coppermine" platform, future Athlon chipsets from ALi, VIA, and SiS must support upcoming technologies such as AGP4X, RDRAM, and PC133 SDRAM. Last August, VIA announced the Apollo KX133 chipset. Boasting support for up to 2GB of PC100/133 memory, the AGP 4X bus, 4 USB ports, and ATA-66 technology, this is just the product we'd like to see shipping on Athlon motherboards. Currently, the Apollo KX133 chipset is sampling to motherboard manufacturers. Expect to see motherboards based on this chipset in January from AOpen, Epox, FIC, Biostar, and Asus being among the first with boards. Future variants of the KX133 will include an integrated graphics solution (via the Savage4 graphics chip) sampling in Q2 '00, and a DDR version of the KX133 scheduled for release in the second half of 2000.

Future Variants

In addition, AMD plans to shift the Athlons manufacturing process to 0.18-micron during the first half of next year. By reducing the process to 0.18-micron, AMD will be able to produce more Athlon chips per wafer than with their current 0.25-micron process. In addition, 0.18-micron chips require less voltage and generate less heat than an equivalent 0.25-micron design allowing them to run at higher clock speeds. These 0.18 Athlons are expected to ship with 256K of integrated L2 cache running at the same speed as the CPU and will feature a 266 MHz bus. (Requiring 133MHz memory.) AMD plans to integrate up to 2MB of L2 cache in the Athlon by the end of 2000.

In the 2nd half of next year, AMD plans to ship 0.18 micron Athlons with copper interconnects. While many industry analysts debate the performance impact of copper vs. aluminum interconnects at 0.18-micron; the experience gained from making the transition early will certainly benefit AMD. In fact, AMD recently opened their "Fab30" plant in Dresden, Germany, which will work full-time on manufacturing copper CPU's. Intel on the other hand doesn't plan to switch to copper interconnects until their shift to 0.13-micron in the second half of 2001.

In the MHz war, AMD is set to announce an even faster version of the Athlon at next weeks' Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. The newest Athlon is expected to run at 750 MHz, making it the fastest desktop CPU in terms of sheer clock speed. AMD has stated for the past several months that they expect to hit the 1GHz mark in 2000, and with Athlon 750's shipping this Christmas 1GHz certainly seems plausible. In the first quarter of next year AMD plans to release the 800MHz Athlon with 1GHz Athlons shipping by the second half of next year.

If you haven't heard, the Athlon is going to shift from its Slot A interface, to a socketed design sometime next year. With Intel's plans to shift Coppermine to the socketed flip chip pin grid array package (FCPGA) next year, an Athlon shift to the socket interface makes a lot of sense. Whether or not this Athlon will fit in a physically identical Socket 370 interface is unknown but seems likely.