As I read over at c’t site, AMD discontinued its Athlon and Duron processors based on Thunderbird and Spitfire cores. These processor cores entered the market about a year and a half ago and due to 0.18micron manufacturing technology allowed AMD to move the processor L2 cache from the processor board into the die.

This way, all the currently manufactured AMD Athlon XP processors are based on 0.18micron Palomino core, and all Duron CPUs – on Morgan core similar to Palomino from the architectural point of view. The same thing has to do with the mobile Athlon 4 and Duron CPUs: they also use the same pair of cores.

Let me remind you that the beginning of mass production of Thoroughbred based 0.13micron CPUs is expected to start in the end of this quarter.

I would also like to point out that since the older Athlon (Thunderbird) has sunk into oblivion, all the performance processors for desktop PCs are intended for 266MHz bus and are marked with the performance rating, and not with their actual working frequency.