Armand Hirt heeft op het message board van Ace's Hardware een posting geplaatst over de nieuwe Athlon Model 4 stepping van AMD. Nieuwe steppings gaan bij AMD gewoonlijk gepaard met hogere 'bin splits' (meer processors die een hogere kloksnelheid bereiken), wat voor overklokkers zou kunnen betekenen dat de nieuwe Model 4 Athlons een goede kans geven op een betere overklokbaarheid. De nieuwe Athlons zijn herkenbaar aan CPUID 643:
An update to the revision guide for the Athlon model 4 is available: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon/techdocs/pdf/23614.pdf . Interestingly, the update to this document had not been published, despite the fact that the techdoc page reported it had been updated in August. Anyways, the document describes a new stepping of Athlon model 4 (TBird) which as expected corrects the problem with the impedance of the ZN and ZP pins (as does the latest revision of the Duron, which has been documneted for two months now). The CPUID of the new stepping is 643. I am still not aware of people reporting availability of the updated Duron stepping, BTW (631).It would be interesting to see information of this kind reported somewhere, for instance together with overclocking information, since it is usual for AMD new steppings to coincide with better bin splits (in other words, it may well be that this is more relevant to you overclockers than AMD decision to use some chemical that gives the die a subtle purple shade). Note that it is unlikely, in my opinion, that the new stepping only corrects the impedance errata, since all socket A MB ever will probably be designed for the old specification anyways.