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Introduction It has only been two months since the release of the very first Athlon XP processor based on the Thoroughbred core, the 32 Athlon XP 2200+. Over the last two years, we have seen from AMD constant releases and updates of the Athlon cores including the Thunderbird, Palomino and Thoroughbred, but all processor releases came in 67 MHz jumps and werent very exciting for the end user. Because AMD was at the top of the desktop market, they didnt need to make leaps and bounds in development in the 32-bit processing arena they were, after all, preoccupied with the upcoming release of the Hammer technology based processors. This all changed this year as Intels Pentium 4 processors based on the Northwood core and an upgrade cache to 512 Kb finally was able to topple the AMD Athlon processor as the king of the benchmarks. Intel was quickly releasing faster and faster processors; The Barton core from AMD will have a larger on-die cache as well, but we wont be seeing that on this processor release. Also, AMD is deeply looking into officially supporting a 166/333 MHz front-side bus on their later Athlon XP processors, but again this is not a feature on this new release processor, but I think this is something you will be seeing rather soon.
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