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A great deal of anticipation about the Thoroughbreds has gone into the question of whether the die shrink will allow further overclocking of the next generation of XP processors. Unfortunately, at present, it does not appear as if there will be a huge gain over the current Palomino CPUs, the rationales were laid out earlier in this review. The XP2200 running at a phisical speed of 1800 MHz would overclock to 1938 MHz albeit with some stability problems. For those only interested in CPUID scores, we could up it beyond 1950 MHz, however, stable operation was not possible beyond 1900 MHz.

Whoever expected new horizons in performance of the Thoroughbred core will be somewhat disapppointed, particularly by the lack of overclocking capabilities. In fact, the XP2100 in my hands clocks higher than the TBred and with the higher FSB and associated memory banddwidth gain, there is not much to be gained for the overclockers community with going for a TBred.

There is an exception to that rule, though, and that exception is that all Thoroughbreds are and will be unlocked, allowing to run them at 166 or whatever crazy FSB speed as long as the mainboard and memory will support it. Unfortunately, at this point, there is no mainboard available that supports changing the Thoroughbred multiplier without crashing but we'll see that happen in the next two weeks, however long they take.

If asked what was the most surprising / enticing feature of the TBred, I would mention the non-linear increase in performance over the Palomino in quite a few applications (and we ran them quite a few times to make sure that this was not just a hoax). For the near future, I would anticipate some cleaner die, some better clocking and, most of all, some cash in AMD's pockets. If the barton with its 512 KB L2 comes through, that'll be some new generation of CPU to check for earthshaking differences in performance, so let's wait and see......

Meanwhile, it'll be interesting to see how much of a difference the smaller die size will make for the overall production costs of the Thoroughbred and, by extension, for AMD's profitability. It may not be the greatest CPU in the world but the TBred is two steps in the right direction, that is, first, cutting down on die size, and second as a pilot project to develop and test the 130 nm process. So far, it sure looks good and with a little bit improved yields, the higher clockspeeds will come, too.

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