John de Gelas van Ace's Hardware heeft een _errug_ interessant artikel gepost met speculaties over de CPU's die we in de loop van volgend jaar mogen verwachten. John verwacht o.a. dat de verbeterde Athlon's met een 'exclusive' L2 cache zullen worden uitgevoerd, waarbij de L1 en L2 caches als één grote 6-way associative emmer van 384Kb zullen werken. Verder zouden Thunderbirds met deels mislukte 256Kb cache herbruikt kunnen worden als Spitfire, eenzelfde strategie die Intel zal toepassen bij de Celeron Coppermine. Hier wat stuff om op te sabbelen:
AMD will produce (very) small amounts of Athlons with 512 KB L2-cache (speculation) and quite a few cores with 256 KB L2-cache (confirmed by several sources). The successful 512 KB cores will be sold in the server market for huge amounts of money, the 512 KB cores of which the L2-cache does not yield entirely correct will, will be sold as 256 KB L2-cache parts, targeted at the high end desktop market and the workstation market.While it isn't sure that there will be Thunderbirds with 512KB L2-cache on die, our sources confirm firmly that 256 KB parts will appear. The Thunderbird cores of which the 256 KB L2-cache does not yield well will be recuperated. If the 128 KB L2-cache is correct, the other part will be disabled and will those CPU's will be sold as 'Spitfires'. The Spitfire, alias the Athlon select is a socketed version of the Athlon, which will compete with the Coppermine 128 in the budget market.
I am pretty sure that you understand now why Intel will introduce Coppermines with only 128 Kb L2-cache in the budget market. Indeed, those Celeron Coppermines will allow Intel to recuperate some of the bad yielded Coppermines (with 256 KB L2-cache) to compete in the budget market.
