At the GDC this week, we had a chance to catch up with AMD about its processor road map for this year and into 2002. Yesterday, AMD announced that 1.3GHz and 1.33GHz processors are now available from some PC makers' direct-retail sites and will be making it into retail systems next month. Also, in contrast to previous Athlon rollouts, OEM and retail boxed processors will be available from resellers soon after launch, in the next couple of weeks. The slightly different speeds of the 1.3GHz and 1.33GHz chips are due to the need to make each a multiple of either the 100MHz or the 133MHz DDR front-side bus used in various recent motherboards.

　　What's notable is that this speed bump to 1.33GHz comes as a direct extension of the Thunderbird core, which was expected to have already hit its upper speed limit. For this reason, AMD pushed its plans to introduce its next-generation Palomino core until this fall, instead of introducing it at 1.2GHz and 1.33GHz speeds as we heard at Comdex last November. The changes between current processors and the Palomino design mainly center on refinements to the limiting components of the pipeline, which will allow it to be introduced at 1.5GHz and go up from there.

　　The Palomino core will first make its appearance in the 1GHz mobile version, which will ship in major notebook makers' products starting in June. This will be AMD's first high-performance mobile processor. It will compete against the Intel 1GHz Pentium III that is just starting to ship in notebooks now. Both manufacturers include their power-saving technology, SpeedStep and PowerNow!. Some Palomino notebooks should support DDR, depending on the chipset, and since the faster memory runs at a lower voltage, 2.2V, it should actually use less power than conventional SDRAM.

　　Further down the road for AMD's desktop plans come Thoroughbred and ClawHammer. Both are on the same early 2002 schedule AMD announced last fall, but they represent different paths for AMD. Thoroughbred is a die-shrink of the Palomino core, moving it from the current .18-micron process to smaller and cooler .13-micron technology. ClawHammer is AMD's first 64-bit processor that will also be backward-compatible with current 32-bit applications. The ClawHammer is expected to debut at 2GHz.