AMD's Thunderbird Soon

The development of Thunderbird, a new chip from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is nearing completion, and will be available in the near future. The new chip offers increased computing performance, with a price fit for cost-sensitive consumers. This new line of Athlon processors is expected to debut in the second half of this year.

Some sources suggest that the Thunderbird processor may be revealed in late May, offering three to five clock speeds reaching as high as 1GHz. However, the chip has been demonstrated running at 1.1GHz.

"From everything we've seen, all systems are go," stated principal analyst at Mercury Research, Mike Feibus. The new chip is expected to match Intel's Willamette CPU, which has been demonstrated at 1.5GHz

The new chip will feature integrated level 2 on-chip cache (expected 256KB). On-chip cache is known to run at full processor speed, which can increase overall performance by up to 10 percent. Thunderbird will also employ copper metal interconnects, which are used to connect transistors within the chip. Current Intel and AMD processors use aluminum interconnects, which deter speed. Intel has no plans to implement copper metal interconnects until next year.

AMD's Thunderbird and Spitfire processors will ship later this year, and are aimed at low-cost desktop PCs.