Josh van Penstar Systems kreeg de kans om Drew Prairie van AMD kort te interviewen tijdens de Game Developers Conference. Uit het gesprek werd onder meer duidelijk dat AMD verwacht dat de Thunderbird ten opzichte van de huidige Athlon een vergelijkbare performance boost krijgt als de K6-III destijds ten opzichte van de K6-2. Verder denkt AMD de capaciteit in Dresden waarschijnlijk volledig kunnen benutten voor de produktie van Thunderbirds en Mustangs:
Drew was tight lipped on how much cache the Athlon "Thunderbird" will actually have, but it is most likely going to be 256 K. When pressed Drew did say that they expected the same kind of performance increase that on-die L2 gave to the K6-2 processor. This will most likely come out to be about a 20% to 30% increase in performance all the way around. When the Thunderbird does come out, it will thoroughly slap around the Intel Coppermine. With AMD's experience with the K6-III and on-die cache, expect there to be a few technical surprises that will give a bit more of a performance edge. Mustang is quite a ways off, but will feature huge amounts of 16 way associative L2 cache on-die. Drew said that AMD was expecting the Thunderbird to be released second quarter and all Thunderbirds would be produced from Fab 30 in Dresden.