Thoroughbred Released!

JavaFox · Jun 10, 2002, 12:09 AM

OUR DAY HAS COME!

I love AMD, but... prepare to be underwhelmed. Probably due to the fact that these chips are brand new, the Thoroughbreds do not overclock well. A big dissapointment, but I've still got faith! Must... wait....

Obligatory Tom's link is here, but if you want a good read, check out Ace's or Tech-Report.

**Asmoday** · Jun 10, 2002, 08:10 AM

AMD will make a strong comeback......(i hope..)

UberLord · Jun 10, 2002, 08:49 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by JavaFox
the Thoroughbreds do not overclock well. A big dissapointment, but I've still got faith!

So they don't overclock well?
Ya know, I'm concerned about how far AMD can push the speed of the chip - if I can make any improvement on the speed and still keep reliability then its a bonus.

Otherwise I'd be sticking a 80386 against a watercooled peltier and ramping up the Mhz to 100% beyond spec

JavaFox · Jun 10, 2002, 11:43 PM

*snipped from my post in the Flamezone, edited to be less belligerent/pompous*

As the following statements show (emphasis mine), T-Bred's inability to overclock is unlikely to be because of an architectural shortcoming, but rather because of its immaturity and diffent design.

http://www.vanshardware.com/:
... I have noticed a very large number of misconceptions in reviews today regarding the "low potential headroom" of AMD's 0.13-micron Athlon XP. It is clear that AMD is currently using a process skew emphasizing higher yields and lower power dissipation, apparently to produce large numbers of mobile chips. This is logical since mobile parts command higher ASPs. Such a mobile-friendly process skew would result in a slower transistor and reduced maximum clock-speeds.

Faster transistors have shorter gate lengths and are therefore leakier (consuming power when doing nothing at all). That AMD is using a slower transistor is demonstrated by typical current in Stop Grant, which is less than one-third of that leaked by the Intel Pentium 4 Northwood core in this sleep mode (the P4-Northwoods wastes an amazing 18A when the chip is doing nothing!). This makes the Thoroughbred a much better mobile part, but higher clock-speeds will likely have to wait until AMD remixes its recipe for faster transistors.

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http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000368:
Our sources indicate that AMD's yields at 0.13µ are pretty good, but that the binsplits have a lot of room for improvement. While 1.5V is good enough to get the Thoroughbred up to 1600 MHz, higher clockspeeds are only attained with some kind of overclocking. Now this is hardly of a reason for panic, as it is even sort of a "tradition" for AMD. With far fewer resources for debugging and tuning, new process technology almost always experiences some teething problems. The highest speed grade (233 MHz) of the 0.35µ K6 needed 3.2V instead of 2.9V, and the first K6-2 batch ran at only 333 MHz, but achieved 450 MHz after some tweaking. At first, the 0.18µ Athlon K75 needed 1.8V to reach 1 GHz, while a few months later, the 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbird happily ran at 1.75V. The first Palominos were limited to 1200 MHz, but achieved 1733 MHz a few months ago. So, as you can see, there's a history here where it always takes a little time to get the most from a particular process/core.