ViaHardware has posted today a peek into AMD´s upcoming processor release, and its connotations for the industry. Discussed is the XEON-competitor Mustang, the Mid-range Palomino, and the Low-end Morgan.

Trailing the Mustang by a month, Palomino will bring the second-gen Athlon core to the mainstream/performance desktop market. Built to compete directly with Intel´s Pentium 4, Palomino will include the same enhancements as the Mustang, minus a large amount of L2 cache, and support for the 770 chipset. Initially debuting with 512K of L2 running at full speed, as opposed to Pentium 4´s 256k, Palomino already has a leg up. Like the Mustang, the second-gen Athlon core allows increased clock speed on an identical process, allowing 1.5GHz using AMD´s standard copper .18Micron process. Greater speeds will be possible with a die shrink to .13Micron, occurring in Q3 2001. This processor will also have reduced power consumption considerably, allowing mobile Athlon platforms for the very first time.

Read more