AMD's Thoroughbred

x-bit news has some information on AMD's new Thoroughbred Athlon XP processors. The story is reporting that AMD's new chips will indeed be compatible with the older Socket A boards, frequencies, and caches. Here's a snip from the article:

So, the CPUs based on the new 0.13micron core will be fully compatible with the current Socket A mainboards. The only thing they may require to be fully compatible with the old mainboards is a BIOS update so that the processors could be properly recognized. The processors themselves however, will be not any different in architecture from Palomino based ones. AMD has once again proven that the L2 cache of Thoroughbred will remain equal to 256KB and the processor bus frequency will stay by 266MHz. This way, migration to a new core will ensure higher working frequencies and lower production costs of Athlon XP processors.

As the performances of Palomino and Thoroughbred working at the same clock frequencies are equal, AMD decided to keep calling the new 0.13micron processors Athlon XP and to continue marking them with the rating calculated using the same formula.

The first launch is expected in late June with an Athlon XP 2400+ running at 1.933GHz. Speaking of rating systems, HardOCP has grabbed some of Intel's latest documents criticizing AMD's system. View them here. Check out x-bit's news here.