The long awaited Athlon CPU based on the Thoroughbred core, or Tbred to its mates, has finally arrived. Well, at least some 1900+ Engineering samples have, and yours truly had the opportunity to play with them. In this preview I will not go into the theory behind AMD's new 0.13-micron manufacturing process, as there are many others considerably well versed to provide this information. What I would like to bring to this preview is my experience tonight, with a couple of these latest offerings from AMD.
Some immediate observations I made were that the die itself is not "thinner" in any way, at least none that I can tell. The required voltage for this core is a mere 1.6V and I predict that these cores will become the Champion of Overclockers everywhere for that alone. Less voltage=less heat, and we all know what that means :)
The setup I used for testing was an Epox 8K3A (on loan from Karma, thanks!), and some Corsair XMS3000 from Realtime Systems, all mounted in my Vapochill case. I will be testing these CPUs at a later date with the KR7A. The voltage options on the Epox board make pushing the chip very easy. For comparison of the TBred core I will use my unlocked Palomino-cored AthlonXP 2000+ (which runs stable at 2004MHz).
All images on this page will enlarge if you click on them. First the setup, as always the trusty Vapochill helps to push your chip to the limits.
The contenders - Thoroughbred on the left, Palomino on the right. Apologies for my dodgy camera.
As you can see the Tbred die is smaller and looks much like the new Durons. As mentioned earlier there is no change in core height that I can detect. Two other noticeable things are: resistors previously found on bottom of packaging have been moved to the top; and the core no longer has the batch/stepping information written on it. Otherwise the CPU's are identical to my eye.
Usage
Firstly an updated BIOS was needed for the Epox mainboard, so
that it would recognise the new core. I used the 2403 BIOS. The
BIOS detected the Tbred chip and booted Windows first time. As
you can see in the image below, WCPUID does not recognize the
chip as yet:
..however Sandra does:
