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There still are a few obstacles that may or may not have to be overcome. One example is the so-called bus threshold, a phenomenon that in particular the 333 MHz processors appear to be plagued with. Briefly, rumor has it that native 333 MHz processors will not run higher bus frequencies than maybe 180 MHz. The workaround is to cut one of the L12 lines to make the board think that the processor natively only supports the 266 MHz bus. There is no real conclusive evidence regarding the why and how and we have not been able to replicate any of this since all of our 333 MHz FSB CPUs were found to run just fine up to 215/430 MHz FSB without cutting any bridges, depending on the mainboard used. Bottom line is that the bus threshold may or may not exist, and if it does, it could be a problem but we cannot comment since we haven't run into it.
If this were true, there would be no problems on the CPU level at all, however, this would also be a very mixed blessing. If all limitations were caused by the supporting hardware, e.g. mainboard or memory, that would mean two things and the most important is that AMD would be, once again at the mercy of third party manufacturers. On the other hand, it could also mean that the end-users have to dig just a little bit deeper into their pockets, which, by the end of the day is still less than the delta to the next higher processor speed grade. Mainboards are getting better with each new revision including BIOS flash and currently, there are already quite a few boards out there that have no problem running 200 MHz FSB.
Any new technology needs a name. We heard the term Athlon XP3200+ already floating around on the web and since the 400 MHz FSB does offer a theoretical interface peak bandwidth of 3200 MB/sec, it appears appropriate to use the name for our purpose even though we don't know at what final clock frequency the XP3200+ will be released.
Most likely, we will see the XP3200+ debut at 2200 MHz, that is using the 11 x multiplier with a 200/400 MHz FSB. For the sake of the argument, however, we are using the same overall clock speed as what the Barton core-based XP3000+ is natively running at, that is 2167 MHz, which however, gives us a 197 MHz bus speed instead of 200 MHz. But then, we want to compare apples with apples rather than going with convenient numbers.
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