SLCentral Forum - View Single Post - Palomino or Thoroughbred: How do you tell?

(Quoted)

Sorry to inform you that the Thoroughbreds start at 2200+. And you'll most likely get a rev. A at that speed.. the only difference between the A & B (i think..) is better heat dissipation. But even at 0.13 microns, it's still very hot...

Actually, they don't, they only started shipping at 2200+, AMD has now integrated the Thoroughbred core down as far as 1700+ even according to their whitepapers on their site.. To quote Anandtech....

"The Thoroughbred core will be introduced at clock speeds that overlap with the older Palomino parts; more specifically, model numbers from 1700+ up to 2200+ will be made available in 0.13-micron Thoroughbred versions."

This was from the Thoroughbred A review...as for the Thoroughbred B core, I've since found AMD's white paper on the stepping 680 and 681 CPU's...the 680 being the Thoroughbred-A, the 681 being the Thoroughbred B (as I understand it). Stepping 680 ranges from the 1700+ to the 2200+....Stepping 681 ranges from the 2000+ to the 2600+....Higher CPU's are likely not mentioned because they've only been paper-launched so far.

I guess I partly answered my question already in doing this research...but indeed the latest SiSoft Sandra 2002 at least tells you what CPU core you have without having to research the steppings, making life a lot easier. So, the Athlon XP 2000+ can indeed come in either Palomino, Thoroughbred-A, or Thoroughbred-B cores...biggest difference is in heat dissipation (Thoroughbred cores run quite a bit cooler, about 10 watts cooler) and the Thoroughbred-B is more likely to overclock well, as it has a 9-metal layer process instead of an 8-layer one, due to the ceiling they hit on the Thoroughbred-A (it didn't scale well above the 2200+).

So, now that I've figured all this out, it remains to be seen which core I'll be shipped. Wish me luck on that one.