Introduction

The latest info

Since publishing our Pentium 4 1.7GHz and Athlon 1.33GHz reviews, a few interesting developments have occurred in the roadmaps for both AMD and Intel, we're here today to bring you the full scoop. We'll start with AMD first ("A" does come before "I" after all), then hit Intel, and finish off the article with our final thoughts. As always feel free to drop your own thoughts in the news comments section, there's sure to be a few interesting debates brewing among our readers there as a result of the news.

AMD: Palomino right around the corner!

As you probably know by now, all Athlon processors are currently produced on AMD's "Thunderbird" core. Thanks to its 256KB of full-speed L2 cache, Thunderbird processors offer a performance boost (that varies depending on clock speed) over the original "K7" (0.25-micron) and "K75" (0.18-micron) Athlon cores released in 1999. Going forward, the company plans to launch its next iteration of the Athlon core, codenamed "Palomino".

In designing Palomino, AMD is focusing on lowering power consumption and the amount of heat generated by the processor core. With 1.33GHz Athlons dissipating up to 70W of power, this relief couldn't come soon enough, especially considering AMD's plans to enter the mobile space with Athlon (more on this later).

Besides running cooler, AMD is also expected to be making a number of performance-enhancing improvements to the Palomino core. Unfortunately, reports have varied widely since Palomino first appeared on AMD roadmaps last year, the latest buzz involves improved branch prediction (either via an improved algorithm or an enhancement to the entire branch prediction unit itself) and hardware prefetching. Other rumors have suggested an increased number of pipeline stages (back when the Thunderbird core appeared to max out at 1.2GHz, therefore necessitating a longer pipeline to scale to higher clock speeds) and a larger L2 cache. Of course, rumors are always fun to talk about, but worth a grain of salt, so take this latter bit of information for what its worth.

One other key addition AMD has indicated for Palomino is its validation for use in multiprocessor systems. Quite simply, it's the only seventh-generation core to receive AMD's official seal of approval to date in these systems. Athlons based on the Thunderbird core may or may not work properly in 2-Way (dual CPU) configurations; the same rule applies to Duron processors. As far as AMD's concerned no official support will be provided for those intrepid enough to attempt this in their own system.

Palomino's final feature will be its incorporation of AMD's PowerNow! Technology.

Launch dates

With the power savings brought by the Palomino core, AMD plans to initially launch this processor in mobile systems. In particular, production of the mobile variant of Palomino began last month, with the official launch slated for next month. Desktop versions of Palomino won't enter production until the 2nd half of this year. Originally, Palomino was expected to ship in both the desktop and mobile segments the first quarter of this year.