NVIDIA MUST BE A GREAT AMD partner because once more it's spoken about the plans of its microprocessor buddy before Hector's even mentioned it.
An Nvidia executive previously confirmed that AMD will launch new FSB 333 processors now called Thoroughbred B, and now the graphics firm has already started to talk about FSB 400 powered Athlons....

At Comdex, Nvidia was demonstrating DDR 400 memory working with FSB 400 Athlons codenamed Bartons and we even heard that you might expect 15 to 20 performance boost from this combination.

The new Athlons will have 512KB of L2 cache making it more competitive with Intel Potato 4 and we assume that AMD will present these processors later this year or at the beginning of Q1 next year.

As for the Nforce 2 boards, you can be sure that you will be able to run Athlons on these boards but we assume that a BIOS update might be needed.

The FSB 400MHz is the last bus stop for the EV 6 Alpha design so don't expect to see any faster processors than that if AMD cannot tweak the limitations of Compaq/DEC/Intel Alpha marchitecture enough.

No need to worry though, since AMD has Athlon 64 horses to run, and hopefully rather sooner than later that will continue the race against Intel Prescott processors next year.

As for 32 bit Athlons, we need to give AMD credit since it drove the original core from 0.25µ (micron) to 0.13µ in just two years of existence and use the same marchitecture all the time with just two socket changes.

We wonder if Via will now tweak the KT400 to deliver a 400MHz bus.

Source | The Inquirer